Can't We Talk about Something More Pleasant?: A Memoir

New York: Bloomsbury USA, 2014. First U.S. Edition - Second Printing . Hard Back. Fine/No Dust Jacket As Issued. 7 3/4" x 9 1/2. 228 Pages. Glossy pictorial boards with purple endpapers. Graphic Novel format. New condition with near flawless interior text and illustration pages. 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, Chasts 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 idiosyncrasiesan 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, Cant We Talk about Something More Pleasant will show the full range of Roz Chasts talent as cartoonist and storyteller.