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Book Salon
Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant?

  • This month we're reading Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant? by Roz Chast. Our faculty host is Andrea Lunsford.

    "Roz Chast has for years and years been among my favorite cartoonists: when I receive my New Yorker I look first to see if she has a contribution in there. But with her graphic memoir, Can't We Talk about Something More Pleasant?, she has outdone even herself. Here her instantly recognizable, quavery, intense drawings team up with photographs and other documents to focus on the last few years of her aging parents' lives, as full of laughter as they are of tears."

    Andrea Lunsford, Louise Hewlett Nixon Professor of English, Emerita, and former director of the Program in Writing and Rhetoric

How to Participate

>> Interview transcript from this month's host, Professor Lunsford

>> Post a message to the online discussion by emailing cantwetalk@discussions.stanford.edu

About this quarter's book selection

This graphic novel memoir follows New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast as she deals with the declining health and ultimate loss of her elderly parents. Chast brings her signature wit to the narrative. Readers are introduced to her father - an anxious man who slips into dementia, and her mother whose overbearing personality has sidelined Chast for decades. Using cartoons, family photos, and documents, she injects both comfort and comic relief into the subject of aging parents in a way that fully captures an uncomfortable topic for many adult children.

The graphic novel follows themes that 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 personal care.

An altogether too familiar story for many Americans, Can’t We Talk about Something More Pleasant? turns what is usually a depressing subject, into a memoir that is a colorful and bittersweet look at life with aging parents.

 

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