Boston College: Roz Chast: Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?

Since joining The New Yorker in 1978, cartoonist Roz Chast has established herself as one of our greatest artistic chroniclers of the anxieties, superstitions, furies, insecurities, and surreal imaginings of modern life. Chast’s recent memoir Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? (2014), tells the story of losing her elderly parents in middle age. The memoir was a #1 New York Times Bestseller, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography, won the inaugural Kirkus Prize for nonfiction, and was a Finalist for the National Book Award in nonfiction. In 2012, she was awarded the N.Y.C. Literary Honor in Humor by Mayor Bloomberg and in 2015 won the Heinz Award for Arts and Humanities. Chast’s cartoons have been published in The New Yorker, Scientific American, the Harvard Business Review, and Mother Jones. Her work has recently been compiled in Theories of Everything: Selected, Collected, and Health-Inspected Cartoons, 1978-2006.