Roz Chast published her first cartoon in The New Yorker in 1978; since then, she's had more than one thousand two hundred and seventy run in the magazine. On a blisteringly cold, recent winter morning, we rode the train to Connecticut and stepped inside her colorful and cartoon-filled home

Roz Chast, “Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?,” Bloomsbury

In her graphic memoir, Ms. Chast, a cartoonist for The New Yorker, details her parents’ final years and their struggles with dementia, illness and financial instability. “No one has perfect parents and no one can write a perfect book about her relationship to them. But Chast has come close,” Alex Witchel wrote in a review in The New York Times.

For the first time in its history, the National Book Foundation has named a cartoonist a contender for its nonfiction award.

Roz Chast, the longtime New Yorker magazine contributor, is one of 10 authors on the nonfiction longlist, the foundation announced this morning.

Chast, however, is the only woman on the list.

To view the full article, please click link below

Roz Chast feels — and draws — our pain. Our neurotic worries and genuine fears, our mundane and existential anxieties, our daydreams, nightmares, insecurities and guilty regrets. Or, rather, she does such a funny, fluent job in her New Yorker cartoons of conveying the things that keep her up at night that many readers are convinced that she is somehow mapping their own inner lives.

To view the full article, please click:
Link

When people talk about extending the human lifespan to 120 it bothers Roz Chast. "That upsets me for a lot of reasons," she tells NPR's Melissa Block. "I feel like these are people who don't really know anybody over 95." The reality of old age, she says, is that "people are not in good shape, and everything is falling apart."

Chast should know. The longtime New Yorker cartoonist is an only child and became the sole caretaker for her parents, George and Elizabeth Chast, when they reached old age. In her new, illustrated memoir — Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant? — Chast mixes the humor with the heartache. It's about the last years of her parents' lives and her relationship with them as their child and conflicted caretaker.

To view the full article, please click:
Link

Parents Safely in the Closet
RIDGEFIELD, Conn. — By way of introducing her parents, Roz Chast opened her closet door and rummaged through some stuff on the floor. This is where she keeps them, amid miscellaneous boxes and general bedroom marginalia: her mother’s ashes in a maroon velvet pouch; her father’s in the Channel 13 tote bag he took with him everywhere.

“I like having my parents in my closet,” is how she explains it in her new graphic novel, “Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?”, which chronicles the pair’s long, precipitous decline, starting from when her mother fell off a stepladder in 2005 to the time she died, in 2009 (Ms. Chast’s father died in the middle of all that). “I think it makes a nice home for them.”

To view the full article, please click:
Link