Can't We Talk about Something More Pleasant?: A Memoir

The New York Times Book Review - Alex Witchel

The New York Times - Michiko Kakutani

Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher

"A tour de force of dark humor and illuminating pathos about her parents’ final years as only this quirky genius of pen and ink could construe them." —Elle  

"An achievement of dark humor that rings utterly true." —Washington Post  

"One of the major books of 2014 . . . Moving and bracingly candid . . . This is, in its original and unexpected way, one of the great autobiographical memoirs of our time." —Buffalo News  

"Better than any book I know, this extraordinarily honest, searing and hilarious graphic memoir captures (and helps relieve) the unbelievable stress that results when the tables turn and grown children are left taking care of their parents. . . [A] remarkable, poignant memoir." —San Francisco Chronicle  

"Very, very, very funny, in a way that a straight-out memoir about the death of one’s elderly parents probably would not be . . . Ambitious, raw and personal as anything she has produced." —New York Times  

"Devastatingly good . . . Anyone who has had Chast’s experience will devour this book and cling to it for truth, humor, understanding, and the futile wish that it could all be different." —St. Louis Post Dispatch  

"Gut-wrenching and laugh-aloud funny. I want to recommend it to everyone I know who has elderly parents, or might have them someday." —Milwaukee Journal Sentinel  

"Joins Muriel Spark's Memento Mori, William Trevor's The Old Boys, and Kingsley Amis's Ending Up in the competition for the funniest book about old age I've ever read. It is also heartbreaking." —Barnes & Noble Review  

"Revelatory… So many have faced (or will face) the situation that the author details, but no one could render it like she does. A top-notch graphic memoir that adds a whole new dimension to readers’ appreciation of Chast and her work." —Kirkus Reviews, starred review

"Chast is at the top of her candid form, delivering often funny, trenchant, and frequently painful revelations—about human behavior, about herself—on every page." —David Small, author of Stitches 

"Never has the abyss of dread and grief been plumbed to such incandescently hilarious effect. The lines between laughter and hysteria, despair and rage, love and guilt, are quavery indeed, and no one draws them more honestly, more . . . unscrimpingly, than Roz Chast." —Alison Bechdel, author of Fun Home  

"Roz Chast squeezes more existential pain out of baffled people in cheap clothing sitting around on living-room sofas with antimacassar doilies in crummy apartments than Dostoevsky got out of all of Russia’s dark despair. This is a great book in the annals of human suffering, cleverly disguised as fun." —Bruce McCall, author of Bruce McCall's Zany Afternoons

From the Publisher

"Poignant and funny . . . [Chast] brings her parents and herself to life in the form of her characteristic scratchy-lined, emotionally expressive characters, making the story both more personal and universal. Despite the subject matter, the book is frequently hilarious, highlighting the stubbornness and eccentricities (and often sheer lunacy) of the author’s parents. It’s a homage that provides cathartic "you are not alone" support to those caring for aging parents . . . This is a cartoon memoir to laugh and cry, and heal, with—Roz Chast’s masterpiece." -Publishers Weekly, starred review

"Revelatory . . . Few graphic memoirs are as engaging and powerful as this or strike a more responsive chord. Chast retains her signature style and wry tone throughout this long-form blend of text and drawings, but nothing she's done previously hits home as hard as this account of her family life . . . A series of wordless drawings of her mother's final days represents the most intimate and emotionally devastating art that Chast has created. So many have faced (or will face) the situation that the author details, but no one could render it like she does. A top-notch graphic memoir that adds a whole new dimension to readers' appreciation of Chast and her work." - Kirkus Reviews, starred review

"Chast's scratchy art turns out perfectly suited to capturing the surreal realities of the death process. In quirky color cartoons, handwritten text, photos, and her mother's poems, she documents the unpleasant yet sometimes hilarious cycle of human doom. She's especially dead-on with the unpredictable mental states of both the dying and their caregivers: placidity, denial, terror, lunacy, resignation, vindictiveness, and rage. . . Chast so skillfully exposes herself and her family on the page as to give readers both insight and entertainment on a topic nearly everyone avoids. As with her New Yorker cartoons, Chast's memoir serves up existential dilemmas along with chuckles and can help serve as a tutorial for the inevitable." - Library Journal, starred review

“If you’ve ever wondered about the origins of Roz Chast’s quavery, quietly desperate, antimacassar-bestrewn universe, look no further. This grim, sidesplitting memoir about the slow decline of her meek father and overpowering mother explains it all. Bedsores, dementia, broken hips—no details are spared, and never has the abyss of dread and grief been plumbed to such incandescently hilarious effect. The lines between laughter and hysteria, despair and rage, love and guilt, are quavery indeed, and no one draws them more honestly, more…unscrimpingly, than Roz Chast.” —Alison Bechdel, author of Fun Home and Are You My Mother?

“Reading Roz Chast has always had the quality of eavesdropping on a person’s private mutterings-to-herself. In this memoir of a most wretched time in her life, Chast is at the top of her candid form, delivering often funny, trenchant, and frequently painful revelations — about human behavior, about herself — on every page.” —David Small, author of Stitches

“After I read this brilliant book, I urged all my friends to read it. Now I have moved on to strangers. So take this book to the cash register this instant. You won’t regret it.” —Patricia Marx, author of Starting from Happy and Him Her Him Again the End of Him
 
 “Roz Chast squeezes more existential pain out of baffled people in cheap clothing sitting around on living-room sofas with antimacassar doilies in crummy apartments than Dostoevsky got out of all of Russia’s dark despair. This is a great book in the annals of human suffering, cleverly disguised as fun.” —Bruce McCall, New Yorker cartoonist and author of Bruce McCall’s Zany Afternoons and The Last Dream-o-Rama

Library Journal

Kirkus Reviews

The Barnes & Noble Review

Roz Chast's Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant? is a graphic memoir — in at least two senses. It joins Muriel Spark's Memento Mori, William Trevor's The Old Boys, and Kingsley Amis's Ending Up in the competition for the funniest book about old age I've ever read. It is also heartbreaking. In its pages, the elements of Chast's most inspired comic work, well known particularly to readers of The New Yorker — impending calamity and aloneness — are no longer mere phantoms but are, instead, intractable, implacable reality. She, an only child, depicts in words, drawings, and ineffable mood her un-self-assured efforts to avert utter disaster as her parents descend into "the part of old age that [is] scarier, harder to talk about, and not part of this culture."

Naturally, this book begins on a doily-accoutered couch, a Chastian fixture as much existential condition as piece of furniture. There we first meet George and Elizabeth Chast, both born in 1912 and now around ninety years old, the two of them stonewalling their daughter's embarrassed attempt to discuss "things" and, well, you know, "plans." This endeavor never evolves further than the eventual relief both sides experience in finally escaping the discussion.

In their prime, so to speak, Elizabeth had been an assistant elementary school principal and George, a high school teacher. Both were children of Russian Jews who came to America at the turn of the twentieth century and grew up a few blocks from each other in tenements in East Harlem ("We had nothing!"). They met in the fifth grade and eventually married without having considered anyone else. As a couple, they are perfectly matched: George, passive, patient, gentle, and anxious, is a man who "chain-worried the way others might chain smoke. He never learned to drive, swim, ride a bicycle, or change a lightbulb." Elizabeth is aggressive, intolerant, confident, and domineering. She writes poetry of sorts, is given to explosions of rage ("blasts from Chast"), and played the piano almost every evening during the author's unlamented childhood while young Roz and her father "would cower in admiration on the couch."

The Chasts brought up the author in a dangerous world in "deep" Brooklyn, a world in which you could get infections from mascara or dirty checkers, or go deaf from not wearing a bathing cap, or be killed by a falling flower pot. Laugh during a meal? Choke to death. Fail to dust and it "gets into the interstices of the furniture and BREAKS IT ALL APART!!!" In addition to numbering other such family- endorsed perils, Chast provides a few details about her two grandmothers that one might call diagnostic: George's mother slept crosswise at the foot of her son's bed until he married, and she covered all the floors in her apartment with newspaper. Elizabeth's mother "believed that people on TV could see her."

By the time Chast manages to get her parents, both now approaching ninety-five, into an assisted living facility (and therein lies a harrowing montage), they have been in the same apartment forty-eight years, deeply disinclined to throw anything out. Chast is confronted with the job of dealing with this monument to pack-rattery and, in tribute, provides an eloquent photo gallery of awe-inspiring vistas of accumulation and select tranches of stuff, including a battalion of her mother's handbags, a lineup of her glasses "from 'before my time," and a "Museum of old Schick shavers."

As her parents move past their ninety-fifth birthdays, their downhill slide picks up speed, taking on additional indignity and pain. Between the two of them, they have, by the end, suffered dementia, diverticulitis, fistula, incontinence, partial blindness, broken hip, bedsores, pneumonia, and the more routine afflictions of high blood pressure, general weakness, and frailty. The ancient hostility between Chast and her mother becomes more fraught after her father's death: Roz longing for some sign that her mother had loved her — this mother, now a lunatic version of her old self-centered, chilly self.

Throughout the book, Chast's drawings express her powerful sense of aloneness. With only a couple of exceptions, it's just Roz — her daughter appears briefly — faced, as she was as a child, with her parents' united front: dysfunctional in the past, positively pathological now. Her style — droopy, alarmed, appalled — perfectly captures her overwhelming feeling of inadequacy in the face of this drawn-out emergency. They show, graphically, how events surround her, and how taking care of parents deep in their dotage is an all-encompassing task.

Still, one might think, without really thinking, that a cartoon book about one's parents' decline and death would be a breach of good taste: disrespectful and not nice. (Can't we illustrate something more pleasant?) But no. The final chapters in both parents' lives, and their daughter's bit part in each, are extremely moving. Certainly, the drawings and text are very funny, but here more than anywhere else in Chast's work, one feels her comedy to be a form of desperate doughtiness, an attempt to foil terror, ease pity, and expiate guilt.

Katherine A. Powers reviews books widely and has been a finalist for the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing from the National Book Critics Circle. She is the editor of Suitable Accommodations: An Autobiographical Story of Family Life: The Letters of J. F. Powers, 1942–1963.

Reviewer: Katherine A. Powers