Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant?
Roz Chast started drawing cartoons while growing up in Brooklyn, New York. She attended Rhode Island School of Design, majoring in Painting. However, she turned to writing and drawing, mainly about domestic and family life, with a sharp focus on depicting anxieties, insecurities and neuroses. She is a staff cartoonist for The New Yorker (and had her first cover published in 1986), and she has also worked for Scientific American, the Harvard Business Review, Redbook, and Mother Jones.
A large compilation of her work was released under the title 'Theories of Everything: Selected, Collected, and Health-Inspected Cartoons of Roz Chast, 1978-2006'. Her 2014 book 'Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant?' is a graphic memoir, combining cartoons, text, and photographs, to tell the story of an only child helping her elderly parents in the final stages of their lives. She has furthermore illustrated many books, including the children's book 'The Alphabet from A to Y, with Bonus Letter, Z' by comedian Steve Martin. Influences in her work can be traced back to female underground cartoonists like Aline Kominsky-Crumb and Lynda Barry.
