Excerpt
SUMMARY: Known for her dry wit, cartoonist Roz Chast finds humor in caring for aging parents in her first graphic memoir, "Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant?" Jeffrey Brown speaks with the New Yorker artist about taking on more personal subject matter and how cartooning became a tool in remembering her late parents.
JEFFREY BROWN (NewsHour): The absurdities, horrors, comedies, most of all perhaps the anxieties of everyday life, these “New Yorker” covers could only have been drawn by longtime staff cartoonist Roz Chast.
She grew up in Brooklyn in Flatbush. Her dad was an assistant school principal and her mom a high school teacher. Author of several books, this year, Chast tackled an uncomfortable subject, but one shared by many. “Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?: A Memoir” is about the last few years of her parents’ lives.
It was a finalist for the National Book Awards, the first time a cartoonist has been nominated in the nonfiction category.
I talked with Chast recently at the Miami Book Fair and asked how this book came to be.
ROZ CHAST, Author, “Can’t We Talk about Something More Pleasant?”: I think I have a habit of, in my head, taking notes on whatever, you know, whether they’re verbal or pictorial or just making a note of things as they’re happening.
And, at some point, I think it started to dawn on me that there was actually a story here that I wanted to put on paper.
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