Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant?
2014
- adult children of aging parents
- aging
- adult children
- psychology
- graphic novels
- american authors
- comic books, strips
- patients
- dementia
- parent-child relations
The story
In her first memoir, 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 Chastian 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. A portrait of two lives at their end and an only child coping as best she can, this book shows the full range of Roz Chast's talent as cartoonist and storyteller. - Publisher.
What it’s like
Dense, hand-lettered four-color panels stacked in small grids, interrupted by faded family photographs, scanned forms, and yellowed documents, so the page feels like an open shoebox of a family's paperwork. Chast's line is wobbly and nervous, with cramped captions crowding the margins and a palette of mustard, cool blue, and pale pink that keeps even the bleakest spreads faintly soft. The mood is wry, anxious, and tender by turns: a cozy, slightly frayed melancholy that reads like sitting up late with a sharp friend who keeps cracking jokes at the hospital vending machine. The rhythm is quick and fragmented, one small scene per panel, with the occasional full-page silence that lands hard. Emotionally it follows an only child learning to become a parent to her own parents, moving from avoidance toward reluctant intimacy. The intensity is low in physical terms, with no violence, but dementia, bodily indignity, and grief are handled frankly, sometimes with blunt humor. It suits a rainy Sunday read or a comfort reread for people who want honesty about aging parents without sentimentality, and for readers who enjoy graphic memoir with a dry, self-deprecating voice.
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