Roz Chast’s dark yet funny memoir Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? became the first comic, graphic novel, or whatchamacallit to be listed as a finalist in the National Book Awards’ sixty-five-year-history. Chast’s competition in the nonfiction category includes John Lahr’s Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh, Anand Gopal’s No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban, and the War through Afghan Eyes, Evan Osnos’s Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China, and E. O. Wilson’s The Meaning of Human Existence.
Here’s my Comics Journal review:
Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? is Roz Chast’s first memoir, but I’ve always scoped a deep autobiographical undercurrent in her cartooning. The characters she’s drawn for The New Yorker since 1978 (eventually becoming the magazine’s star cartoonist), have aged in much the same way that Chast, her parents, and later her own four-person family unit have matured in her drawings – not in a Gasoline Alley sort of way, but in general. Read more at The Comics Journal …
