Something completely new from New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast, a graphic memoir that walks the line between poignancy and humor as she tells the personal story of her parents’ final years.
Roz Chast grew up in Brooklyn. Her cartoons began appearing in the New Yorker in 1978, where she has since published more than one thousand. She wrote and illustrated the #1 NYT bestseller (100+ weeks) Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?, a National Book Critics Circle Award and Kirkus Prize winner and finalist for the National Book Award; What I Hate: From A to Z; and her cartoon collections The Party, After You Left and Theories of Everything. She was awarded the Harvey Award Hall of Fame Award.
By turns grim and absurd, deeply poignant and laugh-out-loud funny.
Ms. Chast reminds us how deftly the graphic novel can capture
ordinary crises in ordinary American lives.
*Michiko Kakutani, New York Times*
A tour de force of dark humor and illuminating pathos about her
parents’ final years as only this quirky genius of pen and ink
could construe them.
*Elle*
An achievement of dark humor that rings utterly true.
*Washington Post*
One of the major books of 2014 . . . Moving and bracingly candid .
. . This is, in its original and unexpected way, one of the great
autobiographical memoirs of our time.
*Buffalo News*
Better than any book I know, this extraordinarily honest, searing
and hilarious graphic memoir captures (and helps relieve) the
unbelievable stress that results when the tables turn and grown
children are left taking care of their parents. . . [A] remarkable,
poignant memoir.
*San Francisco Chronicle*
Very, very, very funny, in a way that a straight-out memoir about
the death of one’s elderly parents probably would not be . . .
Ambitious, raw and personal as anything she has produced.
*New York Times*
Devastatingly good . . . Anyone who has had Chast’s experience will
devour this book and cling to it for truth, humor, understanding,
and the futile wish that it could all be different.
*St. Louis Post Dispatch*
Gut-wrenching and laugh-aloud funny. I want to recommend it to
everyone I know who has elderly parents, or might have them
someday.
*Milwaukee Journal Sentinel*
Joins Muriel Spark's Memento Mori, William Trevor's The Old Boys,
and Kingsley Amis's Ending Up in the competition for the funniest
book about old age I've ever read. It is also heartbreaking.
*Barnes & Noble Review*
Chast tackles those intimate and difficult changes with just the
same humor and honesty as everything else. Readers who are starting
to transition from children to caretakers of their own parents will
find comfort in Chast’s work, and almost anyone can appreciate the
pleas to talk about something more pleasant with your family.
*Paste, 10 Comics to Help You Escape (or Appreciate) Your Family
this Holiday Season*
Revelatory… So many have faced (or will face) the situation that
the author details, but no one could render it like she does. A
top-notch graphic memoir that adds a whole new dimension to
readers’ appreciation of Chast and her work.
*Kirkus Reviews (starred review)*
The book is a literary masterpiece. It’s so profound and emotional
about death and family, it’s just mind-blowing.
*Amanda Peet, Vogue's "Required Reading"*
Chast is at the top of her candid form, delivering often funny,
trenchant, and frequently painful revelations -- about human
behavior, about herself -- on every page.
*David Small, author of Stitches*
Never has the abyss of dread and grief been plumbed to such
incandescently hilarious effect. The lines between laughter and
hysteria, despair and rage, love and guilt, are quavery indeed, and
no one draws them more honestly, more . . . unscrimpingly, than Roz
Chast.
*Alison Bechdel, author of Fun Home*
Roz Chast squeezes more existential pain out of baffled people in
cheap clothing sitting around on living-room sofas with
antimacassar doilies in crummy apartments than Dostoevsky got out
of all of Russia’s dark despair. This is a great book in the annals
of human suffering, cleverly disguised as fun.
*Bruce McCall, author of Bruce McCall's Zany
Afternoons*
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