Roz Chast is probably best known for her funny cartoons in the New Yorker about neurotic people coping--or not-- with the everyday anxiety that life can produce. In her world, panic is the default setting. Roz has also written some dozen books, including, her latest Going into Town: A Love Letter to NY—which started as guidebook of the city for her daughter. And most particularly, the memoir Can’t We Talk about Something More Pleasant which won a raft of prizes including the 2014 National Book Critics’ Circle Award for Autobiography. Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant has also been chosen for the NEA’s Big Read Program. It’s a bold choice and a bold book—equal parts laugh out funny and heartbreaking. Roz Chast is an only child whose parents were in their mid-90s and living in the same run-down Brooklyn apartment they’d been in for 48 years. Then her mother’s physical health and father’s mental state began to falter and they were unable to care for themselves any longer . Can’t We Talk about Something More Pleasant is a graphic memoir that combines cartoons, found documents and photographs to chronicle the conflicting emotions and practical challenges of her parents’ last years and passing with enormous heart and without a trace of sentimentality. We’re living a longer life and more often than not advanced old age brings enormous physical and mental diminishment; and, as Roz Chast points out, this is not something we talk about—and it’s not something most of us know about…until we have to.
The National Endowment for the Arts Celebrates cartoonist Roz Chast
