Title: Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant?
Description: 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 Chastian 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. A portrait of two lives at their end and an only child coping as best she can, this book shows the full range of Roz Chast's talent as cartoonist and storyteller. - Publisher.
Subjects: Adult children of aging parents, Aging, Adult Children, Psychology, Graphic novels, American Authors, Comic books, strips, Patients, Dementia, Parent-Child Relations, Family, Cartoonists, Personal Memoirs, Terminal Care, Caregivers, Aging parents, Nonfiction, Artists, Family relationships, Aged, Cloth or Hardcover, Biography, Care, Comics & graphic novels, nonfiction, biography & memoir, Dementia, popular works, Parent and adult child, nyt:hardcover-graphic-books=2014-05-25, New York Times bestseller, Medicine, Elderly, Families, Jewish families, Roz Chast, Pictorial Wit and humor, Humor, Family Relations