October 2024
Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? by Roz Chast
Post by Rachel Shiryayeva - S.U.R.E. Diversity book club organizer and curator
For our second book club meeting, we got together to talk about a book about aging
and death. Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? is a memoir by Roz Chast, who
is best known for her comics published in the New Yorker magazine.
The book includes paneled comics, handwritten prose mixed with pictures with
speech bubbles, some photos, and, as a final offering, some sketches of the author’s mother
in the last moments of her life.
As in our first meeting, we started by going around in a circle and sharing a moment
that stood out to us.
I found this to be a difficult task as just about every page captivated me. Chast’s
idiosyncratic offerings include downright funny depictions of humans interacting not only with
one another but with their physical possessions, usually in a domestic setting, and in a world
of their own making. Chast brilliantly captures this world through authentic dialogue and
lively anecdotes that transform the humdrum minutiae of everyday existence into something
very special. Chast shows that we are all unique. It may be that she and her family are
especially unique.
In the end, I chose to talk about Chast’s father. I loved the way he was afraid of
common household objects. He was wary of the toaster, he marveled at the intricacies of
the hair brush, he trembled at unworkable house keys, and he cowered at the terrifying
prospect of changing a light bulb.
Just as wonderful, I thought, was the fact that he did not possess a driver’s license or
a credit card.
I found it reassuring that a person could somehow survive in this world without
certain (modern) basic skills and tools, even if I understood that it meant this person must be
relying on the help of a more capable individual in the household. Come to think of it though,
no doubt the very advanced age of Chast’s father must have heightened his fears and
insecurities.
We talked about “Goodie”, the Jamaican caretaker Chast’s mother had in the last
days of her life. We shared with Chast the feeling of appreciation for this hardworking
individual who dedicated her working life to care for an elderly white woman. Here is how
Chast put it:
“Goodie volunteered to do both shifts-to sleep in my mother’s room, on the sofa. I
wanted to buy her a bed, but she said the sofa was o.k. We worked out the payments. It was a phenomenal expense, but it was a phenomenal job. And she and my mother had
BONDED. My mother had surrendered control to a lovely stranger.” (p.183)
We also spoke about what happens to parent-child relationships as we grow and
change. Chast at times felt that she was in the way as her parents were very close, even
codependent.
Another topic a reader commented on was the way Chast’s mother annoyed her
daughter by distorting the past with wrong memories. A few of us could relate to that issue:
The more we revisit old memories and retell old stories, the more events become skewed.
The confusion that often comes with old age exacerbates this. Chast and her mother could
not agree at times on who was responsible for what action. I think the example in the book
was an argument over who had taught Chast to roller skate.
Another topic we discussed was the lifetime accumulation of possessions. Roz Chast
had a tremendous job on her hands when it came to clearing her parents’ home out after
they moved into an assisted living situation. In the book she shares photos she took of the
sorted piles of her parents’ things. She provides handwritten captions for the photos. Here
are some of them:
My mother’s glasses-all from “before my time.”
Stapler from my childhood. Guess it still worked.
Museum of old Schick shavers.
Random art supplies.
S-o-o-o-o many pencils!!!!!
Why was there a drawer of jar lids?
Random shelf. My old baby shoes.
There are also pictures of each of her parents’ “work stations”, the surfaces of which are
cluttered with tremendous piles of books and notebooks. There is a photo of her mother’s
collection of about thirty purses, in the kitchen an old blender from the 1950’s, and an old
“cheese-tainer” from the “mid-1960’s”. (This was an invention of her mother’s–a container to
hold cheese.) (p.116)
Chast’s most important finds were some “tattered, decomposing cardboard cartons”
(p.120). One of these held “hundreds and hundreds” of letters her father had written to her
mother when he was in the Navy during WWII. Another carton contained “hundreds and
hundreds” of letters her mother had written back (p.120).
The book club member who brought up this topic remarked on the importance of
such objects to people, and the way this emotional attachment grows over time.
While there are so many parts of the book we did not have time to discuss (and
which I am not writing about here), probably one of the most poignant moments is in the
second to last chapter (Chapter 17: Chrysalis, p.195). At this point, Chast makes what must
have been a supreme effort to reach out to her mom in what she thought might be their “final
conversation”. Her speech bubble in the first panel of the comic is labeled “June 24th, 2009.”
It goes as follows:
“I wish we could have been better friends when I was growing up.” In saying this,
Chast hopes her mother will respond with a “Me too,” but in fact her mother’s actual
response is “Does it worry you?” Chast then replies “No…Does it worry YOU?” Her mother’s answer is simply “No.” The tone of this deeply unsatisfying answer is emphasized by the picture of her mother’s face, with drooping eyelids and small, expressionless eyes. Finally, Roz Chast’s character asks “Do you want me to stay, or should I go?” “It doesn’t matter,” says the ancient mother.
On the next page we find Chast in her car, sobbing bitterly. “...the depth of sadness I
felt surprised me. I felt surprised. I was angry, too. Why hadn’t she tried harder to know me?”
Following this, the last chapter includes several sketches of her mother as she
sleeps, her face lined, her sleeping expression still very human and alive. The intimacy
allowed us here is all the more powerfully felt because no words appear on these pages.
They are uniquely uncluttered. It is as if each page has been cleared in order to bring the
attention, quietly, to a singular image. Just one comment appears under the last picture: “My
mother died tonight at 8:28.”
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