Roz Chast. (2014). Can't We Talk about Something More Pleasant?: A Memoir. Bloomsbury Publishing.

Roz Chast. 2014. Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant?: A Memoir. Bloomsbury Publishing.

Roz Chast, Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant?: A Memoir. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014.

Roz Chast. Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant?: A Memoir. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014.

OverDrive Product Record

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title

Can't We Talk about Something More Pleasant?

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keywords

1. • value: cartoon
2. • value: Death
3. • value: true story
4. • value: only child
5. • value: adult children
6. • value: aging parents
7. • value: heartfelt
8. • value: graphic memoir

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1. • role: Author
   • fileAs: Chast, Roz
   • bioText: Roz Chast grew up in Brooklyn. Her cartoons began appearing in the New Yorker in 1978. Since then, she has published more than one thousand cartoons in the magazine. She has written and illustrated many books, including What I Hate: From A to Z, and the collections of her own cartoons The Party After You Left and Theories of Everything. She is the editor of The Best American Comics 2016 and the illustrator of Calvin Trillin's No Fair! No Fair! and Daniel Menaker's The African Svelte, all published in Fall 2016.
   • name: Roz Chast

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title

Can't We Talk about Something More Pleasant?

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#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

1. • premium: False
   • source: Michiko Kakutani, New York Times
   • content: By turns grim and absurd, deeply poignant and laugh-out-loud funny. Ms. Chast reminds us how deftly the graphic novel can capture ordinary crises in ordinary American lives.
2. • premium: False
   • source: Washington Post
   • content: An achievement of dark humor that rings utterly true.
3. • premium: False
   • source: Buffalo News
   • content: 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.
4. • premium: False
   • source: San Francisco Chronicle
   • content: 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.
5. • premium: False
   • source: New York Times
   • content: 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.
6. • premium: False
   • source: St. Louis Post Dispatch
   • content: 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.
7. • premium: False
   • source: Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
   • content: Gut-wrenching and laugh-aloud funny. I want to recommend it to everyone I know who has elderly parents, or might have them someday.
8. • premium: False
   • source: Barnes & Noble Review
   • content: 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.
9. • premium: False
   • source: Paste, 10 Comics to Help You Escape (or Appreciate) Your Family this Holiday Season
   • content: Chast tackles those intimate and difficult changes with just the same humor and honesty as everything else. Readers who are starting to transition from children to caretakers of their own parents will find comfort in Chast's work, and almost anyone can appreciate the pleas to talk about something more pleasant with your family.
10. • premium: False
    • source: Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
    • content: 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.
11. • premium: False
    • source: Amanda Peet, Vogue's "Required Reading"
    • content: The book is a literary masterpiece. It's so profound and emotional about death and family, it's just mind-blowing.
12. • premium: False
    • source: David Small, author of Stitches
    • content: 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.
13. • premium: False
    • source: Alison Bechdel, author of Fun Home
    • content: 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.
14. • premium: False
    • source: Bruce McCall, author of Bruce McCall's Zany Afternoons
    • content: 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.
15. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      Starred review from March 10, 2014
      “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.

16. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      Starred review from February 1, 2014
      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 becomes--until, 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(2014) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

17. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      Starred review from March 15, 2014
      

      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.

      Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

popularity

1166

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1. • value: Biography & Autobiography
2. • value: Reference
3. • value: Nonfiction

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05/06/2014

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#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...

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awards

1. • source: National Book Foundation
   • value: National Book Award Finalist
2. • source: The National Book Critics Circle
   • value: National Book Critics Circle Award
3. • source: The New York Times
   • value: 10 Best Books of 2014

subtitle

A Memoir

publisher

Bloomsbury Publishing

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1. • code: BIO026000
   • description: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Memoirs
2. • code: CGN007000
   • description: Comics & Graphic Novels / Nonfiction / General