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Faculty Book Review
Mary Kay Waterman
Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?
During the school year, when I need a break from re-reading Hamlet or skimming debate briefs but don’t have time for Dostoyevsky, I sometimes opt for a graphic novel. Roz Chast’s 2014 graphic memoir Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? was both hard to pick up and hard to put down. I’ve enjoyed Chast’s cartoons in The New Yorker since my late teens, but I shied away from her memoir when I learned of its subject matter: Chast’s experience of caring for her parents through their nineties; their dementia and multiple illnesses; and their eventual deaths. I’m not one to cry over books or movies, so Chast’s typically unsentimental approach to an excruciating topic appealed to me. Plus, it was told in cartoons, so it had to be funny, right? It was. But what I didn’t expect were the abrupt changes in tone; in a single frame, the memoir switched from hilarity to despair. And back and forth again countless times. Her drawings, and even a few photographs, reveal in exacting detail the agonizing details of her parents’ decline- their hoarding of ancient items in their apartment; their resistance to downsizing; and the endless logistics of caring for them in decline. At the heart of her memoir is a candid and common complaint: It’s hard to say goodbye to our loved ones, but perhaps even harder to witness their suffering and the financial strain of prolonged illness and care, and to glimpse in all of it our own mortality. I laughed; I cried.