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Product Details
Hardcover: 240 pages
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA; First Edition edition (May 6, 2014)
* As I write this, my 83-year-old dad is withering away in an assisted living facility, riddled with Alzheimer's. Sometimes I want my Dad to die now - because he's unaware of his suffering - and he'd cuss me out if he knew he is turning into what Roz Chast's mother describes as "a pulsating piece of protoplasm." I feel guilty feeling this way - but "Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant?" makes such forbidden thoughts feel normal.
* (BTW, don't buy the Kindle version. This title, with its colorful cartoons and photos - as well as its handsome construction as a hardcover book - truly belongs on your coffee table. I sampled the Kindle version, didn't like it, and bought the hardcover.)
* This book feels weirdly clairvoyant. It exposed my doubts, fears and paradoxical feelings about watching my parents die slowly before my eyes. I've read almost everything about the subject of aging and dying. And yet this is the first book that captures the exhausting experience of caring for aging parents, e.g., that it's sometimes gross - (see passages about hoarding, incontinence and "grime") - AND funny - (see "The Wheel of Doom" and Roz Chast's father's obsession with myriad bank books, decades old).
* The author's hand-wringing about whether there's going to be enough money to pay for her parents' care is spot on. How long will the money last if they live "X" more years vs. "Y" more years? I do these calculations every month, constantly updating and trying to prepare for the worst. Any savings will be drained by expenses which will have no effect on terminal outcomes. If the daily care and feeding of your parents doesn't kill you - then the avalanche of paperwork and legal stuff that must be done - will.Read more ›
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160 of 170 people found the following review helpful
Cartoonist Roz Chast has written/drawn a book about her parents' final years, "Can't We Talk About Something Pleasant?". In it she describes both her own upbringing - only child, born late-in-life to older and neurotic parents - and how her feelings as a child hindered her dealing with the parents as they aged. She is certainly not alone in her mixed-up emotions towards her parents; most of us have the same feelings. Roz Chast can just express them better.
This is a difficult book to read. It must have been excruciating to live through and then put down on paper. But it is a book that all us "boomers" (hate the word but what else is there? "Lunch meat in the sandwich generation"?) should read. Because I'm not sure too much is going to change when we reach our 80's and 90's. We tend to have fewer children - Roz was an only child, as I noted above - and so fewer people to share the burdens of us as we age. Will we be put in Assisted Living "places" with the alacrity we seem to be putting our own parents into? For the record, both my parents died in nursing homes where they received excellent care.
Roz Chast's parents - George and Elizabeth - lived well into their 90's. And they aged "together". They tried to take care of themselves and each other in their dingy Brooklyn apartment, but it came the time to get them the extra care they could no longer give themselves. Roz describes how going through her parents' vacated apartment was like going through a junk store haven. And she shows photographs - as well as using her drawings - to show how crowded the apartment truly was.
The reader may come away thinking Roz had conflicted feelings about her parents. She sure did and she was certainly entitled to those feelings.Read more ›
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12 of 14 people found the following review helpful
Years ago, a woman friend gave me a copy of Chast's "Parallel Universes," commenting, "Someone gave me this, but I didn't get it." I opened the book, began flipping through - and on just about every page was CONVULSED with laughter. The friend, with whom I lost contact a few years after, was likely a little annoyed. The book is still on my shelf - although we did clip "The Style of Elements" cartoon for my daughter's middle school science project (on one of the rare earth metals), a photocopier/scanner/printer not being at hand when we thought to include it.
About a decade later, a former colleague and writer (also a woman) invited me to a talk by Chast at the Brooklyn Museum. By then I had purchased several of Chast's books of cartoons, followed her New Yorker cartoons, took great vicarious pleasure in reading about her personal and professional life. What struck me at the talk was how much her speech and mannerisms reminded me of Woody Allen. (Allen's work will always be funny to me, especially the writing, no matter what is said or conjectured about the man himself.). It came up that Chast's mother had been a teacher (I thought) at Erasmus High School, where Allen had been a student. I then imagined that area of Brooklyn as a paradise of darkly whimsical humor, with Allen penning "If The Impressionists Had Been Dentists" (Vincent Van Gogh getting a bit too creative with a dental bridge, with teeth "flaring out in every direction like a starburst chandelier" and his reaction to the complaints of his patient "She is so stupid, I want to smash her!") and Chast drawing "Pollyanna in Hell" ("Yay - no more down coats forever!Read more ›
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This item: Can't We Talk about Something More Pleasant?: A Memoir
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