Who doesn’t recognise the work of Roz Chast? Her idiosyncratic cartoons, tinged with a mixture of regret, awkwardness and grumpy, world-weary cynicism, have been part and parcel of the New Yorker’s personality for as long as I can remember. I love her cartoons – particularly the bigger ones where she was given a whole page to play around with. She always seemed to be at her best when she was drawing outside the usual boxes.
So it comes as a particular delight to learn that she has just written a long-format graphic memoir: Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? The work is about the difficult and messy experience of her parents’ deaths, a subject which – judging from the review in this weekend’s Guardian – seems to inspire her to particular heights of wryly grim observation: the “dread, guilt and a weird kind of claustrophobia” that is her speciality.
At one point in the review, she’s quoted as saying of the response to her book:
Mostly people are glad that I’ve said it was really hard, and really messy. I wanted to write about the entire experience, including the parts that were gross, and funny, and including my mixed feelings about my parents. I didn’t want to write with a fake, rosy glow.
It’s interesting that she uses the word “write” rather than, say, “show”, because surely one of the most powerful aspects of graphic memoir is not just that it is about telling people how you experienced something, but showing how you saw it and how it came across to you. I’ve always liked the way Roz Chast’s New Yorker cartoons show the vagaries of urban New York life – despite their humorous intent, it feels like her cartoons have given me the most realisic impression over the years of what living that kind of life feels like. And so I’m excited about the prospect of reading something of hers that’s much longer and more personal – and being shown what detail her idiosyncratic eye finds in the messy experience of grief.
