Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant?

Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? by Roz Chast
Nonfiction – Graphic Memoir
2014 Bloomsbury USA
Finished on February 27, 2015
Rating: 2/5 (OK)

 


Overview:

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't We Talk about Something More Pleasant will show the full range of Roz Chast's talent as cartoonist and storyteller.

#1 New York Times Bestseller
2014 National Book Critics Circle Award Winner for Autobiography
2014 National Book Award Finalist for Nonfiction
2014 Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction Winner
One of the New York Times Book Review's 10 Best Books of 2014


Having just read Being Mortal, Atul Gawande’s remarkable book on medicine and the end of life, I was sadly disappointed with Roz Chast’s graphic memoir, Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? I’ve only read a couple of books in this format and it takes a little getting used to reading the text and looking at the cartoons. However, that wasn’t the cause of my displeasure. I understand that Chast was trying to be completely, perhaps brutally, honest about her experience with the care of her aging parents, but I felt she was a little too candid and somewhat hurtful in the way she expressed her annoyance and frustrations toward her mother and father. Not every negative thought needed to be shared to convey how difficult it was to take care of her parents as they grew more and more unable to do so themselves. I found myself cringing every so often, putting myself in Chast’s shoes, wondering how my mother would feel if I published a book about her final years. This tell-all felt somewhat disrespectful and in poor taste.

With that said, there was a series of drawings that made me laugh out loud. I used to have an oven mitt with holes and scorch marks, dating back to at least 1992. I have since thrown it away. I do, however, own a plastic pasta serving fork that has been missing a couple of tines for many, many years. But, hey! It still works! ;)

As you can see, my attempt to take a few shots of this graphic memoir failed miserably. You can see more and read a portion of the memoir here.

Click here to listen to an interview with the author on NPR’s Fresh Air.

Final Thoughts:

Judging from a wide variety of online reviews, I see that I’m in the minority with my less than stellar rating for this graphic memoir. It quickly became quite apparent that the author did not share a close relationship with her mother and I felt bad that Chast was compelled to express her unhappiness about that relationship in a public format. The details centered around the care of aging parents (the expense, the stress, the overwhelming sense of the unknown) were helpful, not to mention eye-opening. And yet, I believe Atul Gawande was able to achieve the same effect with much more empathy and tenderness, both toward his father and other seniors, than Chast did toward her own parents. If you plan to read both books, borrow Chast's from the library and read it first. Then buy two copies of Gawande’s: one for you and one for either your parents or your children.

Maus I

Maus I: A Survivor's Tale: My Father Bleeds History by Art Spiegelman
Nonfiction - Graphic Memoir
1986 Pantheon
Winner of the 1992 Pulitzer Prize
Finished on 6/13/09
Rating: 3.5/5 (Good)



Publisher's Blurb:

Maus is the story of Vladek Spiegelman, a Jewish survivor of Hitler's Europe, and his son, a cartoonist who tries to come to terms with his father, his father's terrifying story, and History itself. Its form, the cartoon (the Nazis are cats, the Jews mice), succeeds perfectly in shocking us out of any lingering sense of familiarity with the events described, approaching, as it does, the unspeakable through the diminutive. It is, as the New York Times Book Review has commented, "a remarkable feat of documentary detail and novelistic vividness...an unfolding literary event."

Moving back and forth from Poland to Rego Park, New York, Maus tells two powerful stories: The first is Spiegelman's father's account of how he and his wife survived Hitler's Europe, a harrowing tale filled with countless brushes with death, improbable escapes, and the terror of confinement and betrayal. The second is the author's tortured relationship with his aging father as they try to lead a normal life of minor arguments and passing visits against a backdrop of history too large to pacify. At all levels, this is the ultimate survivor's tale--and that, too, of the children who somehow survive even the survivors.

Part I of Maus takes Spiegelman's parents to the gates of Auschwitz and him to the edge of despair. Put aside all your preconceptions. These cats and mice are not Tom and Jerry, but something quite different. This is a new kind of literature.

It's been years since I first heard about this book and I'm glad I finally got around to getting a copy to read. I've never read a graphic novel (although that's a misnomer for this work, as it's not fiction but rather a memoir), so I wasn't sure what to expect. Would the cartoons distract me? Would they minimize the horrors of the Holocaust? Surprisingly, I found I didn't spend too much time looking at the drawings and wondered if this was common or if a true graphic novel demands more attention to the artwork. And I certainly didn't think this form of narrative did anything to minimize the severity of the story. If anything, its impact might actually have been enhanced, rather than minimized, by the fact that it's such a horrible story told in a medium normally reserved for more innocent, child-like pursuits.

Maus is a deeply moving story, especially knowing it's Spiegelman's father's true history. In spite of the subject matter, I enjoyed this compelling book (as well as one can enjoy such a tragic tale) and I look forward to reading Maus II: A Survivor's Tale: And Here My Troubles Began.
Go here to listen to an excellent NPR interview with Art Spiegelman.