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Summary
Summary
#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.
Reviews (6)
School Library Journal Review
Adult/HS-Veteran New Yorker cartoonist Chast powerfully recounts her parents' decline through weakness, senility, and death. Chast's scratchy hand emphasizes their age and fragility, while interspersed personal photographs drive home the reality of the situation. Her portrayal of the humiliations of infirmity and the sadness of nursing facilities creates relatable and thought-provoking circumstances for teens to ponder. © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Publisher's Weekly Review
"Something more pleasant" than the certainty of old age and death is what Chast's parents would prefer to talk about, in this poignant and funny text-and-cartoon memoir of their final years. (In one cartoon, the Grim Reaper declares, "The Chasts are talking about me? Why, I'll show them!") Chast, a cartoonist who contributes frequently to the New Yorker, describes how her parents, George and Elizabeth, try her patience as she agonizes over their past and future. She 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. Like Raymond Briggs's classic Ethel and Ernest, this is a cartoon memoir to laugh and cry, and heal, with-Roz Chast's masterpiece. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
A revelatory and occasionally hilarious memoir by the New Yorker cartoonist on helping her parents through their old age. Few graphic memoirs are as engaging and powerful as this or strike a more responsive chord. Chast (What I Hate, 2011, etc.) 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 as the only child of parents who had never even dated anyone else and whose deep bond left little room for this intruder in their midst. Yet, "the reality was that at 95, their minds and bodies were falling apart," and these two people who had only relied on each other were forced to rely on a host of caretakers, their daughter in particular, and to move from the Brooklyn apartment that had been home for half a century into a series of facilities that provided fewer and fewer amenities at escalating expense. Chast rarely lapses into sentimentality and can often be quite funny, as she depicts mortality as "The Moving Sidewalk of Life" ("Caution: Drop-Off Ahead") or deals with dread and anxiety on the "Wheel of DOOM, surrounded by the cautionary' tales of my childhood." The older her parents get, the more their health declines and the more expensive the care they require, the bleaker the story becomesuntil, toward the end, a series of 12 largely 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.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
New Yorker cartoonist and prolific author Chast (What I Hate from A to Z, 2011) writes a bravely honest memoir of watching her parents decline, become too frail to stay in the Brooklyn apartment they called home for five decades, suffer dementia and physical depletion, and die in their nineties in a hospice-care facility. Unlike many recent parent-focused cartoon memoirs, such as Alison Bechdel's Are You My Mother? (2012) and Nicole J. George's Calling Dr. Laura (2012), in which the story is as much about the cartoonist's current work and family life as it is about his or her parents, Chast keeps her narrative tightly focused on her mother and father and her own problematic though not uncommon guilt-provoking relationships with them. Chast's hallmark quirky sketches are complemented by annotated photos from her own and her parents' childhoods. Occasionally, her hand-printed text will take up more than a full page, but it's neatly wound into accompanying panels or episodes. An unflinching look at the struggles facing adult children of aging parents.--Goldsmith, Francisca Copyright 2014 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
CAN'T WE TALK ABOUT SOMETHING MORE PLEASANT?, by Roz Chast. (Bloomsbury, $19.) Chast, who has contributed cartoons to The New Yorker for nearly 40 years, illustrates the experience of caring for her dying parents in this poignant and devastating graphic memoir, one of the Book Review's 10 Best Books of 2014. As our reviewer, Alex Witchel put it: "No one has perfect parents, and no one can write a perfect book about her relationship to them. But Chast has come close." THE STATE WE'RE IN: Maine Stories, by Ann Beattie. (Scribner, $15.) In these linked tales, Beattie's first collection of new stories in 10 years, psychological states matter just as much as geography. The collection traffics in ennui, with recurring characters. One is Jocelyn, a teenager living with her aunt and uncle for the summer while her mother recuperates from a mysterious illness; she is a bright spot in the world presented by the book. SOUTH TOWARD HOME: Travels in Southern Literature, by Margaret Eby. (Norton, $15.95.) Equal parts travelogue and critical inquiry, this book considers the region's literary heritage. Eby, an Alabamian by birth and upbringing, goes on pilgrimage to the haunts of 10 favorite authors, including William Faulkner, Richard Wright, Flannery O'Connor and Harper Lee. LAST BUS TO WISDOM, by Ivan Doig. (Riverhead, $16.) Known for chronicling life in Big Sky Country, Doig, who died last year, turned to Montana once more in this, his final novel. Eleven-year-old Donal Cameron, under his grandmother's care, takes a Greyhound bus from her ranch to Wisconsin, where he lives briefly with an unkind relative. Soon enough, though, he's back out West again, joined by a one-eyed sailor he meets along the way. MACHINES OF LOVING GRACE: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots, by John Markoff. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $15.99.) In the world of artificial intelligence, there are two prevailing approaches: an aim to augment human capacities, or the goal of creating machines to do the work currently performed by people. This thoughtful analysis by Markoff, a reporter for The New York Times, wades into the ethical and philosophical questions that such technological advances inevitably raise. FINALE: A Novel of the Reagan Years, by Thomas Mallon. (Vintage, $16.95.) It's 1986 during this novel, and Reagan, partway through his second term, has yet to become canonized as the Republican Party's patron saint. Mallon - whom our reviewer, Robert Draper, called "a poised storyteller who traffics in history's ironic creases" - draws on a mix of fictional and real-life characters, including Mikhail Gorbachev and Nancy Reagan's astrologer. SISTERS IN LAW: How Sandra Day O'Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg Went to the Supreme Court and Changed the World, by Linda Hirshman. (Harper Perennial, $16.99.) The justices can be seen "as representatives of the different ways that smart, ambitious women navigated life in mid-20th-century America," Linda Greenhouse wrote here.
Library Journal Review
Chast (Theories of Everything) draws the Moving Sidewalk of Life with a sign: "Caution-drop-off ahead." The New Yorker cartoonist had vaguely thought that "the end" came in three stages: feeling unwell, growing weaker over a month or so in bed, and dying one night. But when her parents passed 90, she learned that "the middle [stage] was a lot more painful, humiliating, long-lasting, complicated, and hideously expensive" than she imagined. 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. VERDICT Like Joyce Farmer in Special Exits (LJ 9/15/10), 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.-M.C. (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.