Can't we talk about something more PLEASANT? / Roz Chast.

I really liked this graphic novel -- it's an excellent read. I read it a few weeks ago and realized that its topic coincides with a recent KT discussion on elder care. The memoir is interesting to a general reader, and would especially appeal to anyone concerned with the needs of elderly relatives or for elderly individuals struggling with living arrangements. I expected that it would be very humorous, and it is, but also poignant and highlights some difficult issues faced by the elderly and their families.

Roz Chast is an illustrator and her cartoons have appeared in the New Yorker since 1978. In this volume, she shows how her formerly very independent parents' health declined as they grew older and she realized that they would no longer be safe living in their long-time home. She needed to make alternate arrangements for them. The Chasts had lived in the same New York apartment for many years and wanted to maintain life as it had always been. They certainly didn't want to move. Not the least of Roz's concerns in caring for her parents was worrying about whether their funds would be enough to see them comfortably to the end of their lives.

The book is also a portrait of Mr. and Mrs. Chast and Roz's relationship with them until her experience of their deaths. There are hilarious descriptions of her parents' eccentricities and personalities - her mother was firm and authoritarian and her father was anxious and indecisive. Her parents were married for many years and were very devoted to each other and to their only child.

Publisher's Weekly review: "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.