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Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant?
Roz Chast
Bloomsbury
May 2014
On Sale: May 6, 2014
240 pages ISBN: 1608198065 EAN: 9781608198061 Kindle: B00JA9JE0Y Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction Memoir
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 Chast-ian 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. An amazing portrait of two lives at their end and an only
child coping as best she can, Can We Talk about Something
More Pleasant will show the full range of Roz Chast’s talent
as cartoonist and storyteller.
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