#1 New York Times Bestseller
2014 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST
In her first memoir, New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast brings her
signature wit to the topic of aging parents. Spanning the last several
years of their lives and told through four-color cartoons, family
photos, and documents, and a narrative as rife with laughs as it is with
tears, Chast's memoir is both comfort and comic relief for anyone
experiencing the life-altering loss of elderly parents.
When it came to her elderly mother and father, Roz held to the practices
of denial, avoidance, and distraction. But when Elizabeth Chast climbed
a ladder to locate an old souvenir from the "crazy closet"--with
predictable results--the tools that had served Roz well through her
parents' seventies, eighties, and into their early nineties could no
longer be deployed.
While the particulars are Chast-ian in their idiosyncrasies--an anxious
father who had relied heavily on his wife for stability as he slipped
into dementia and a former assistant principal mother whose overbearing
personality had sidelined Roz for decades--the themes are universal:
adult children accepting a parental role; aging and unstable parents
leaving a family home for an institution; dealing with uncomfortable
physical intimacies; managing logistics; and hiring strangers to provide
the most personal care.
An amazing portrait of two lives at their end and an only child coping
as best she can, Can't We Talk about Something More Pleasant will show
the full range of Roz Chast's talent as cartoonist and storyteller.
