Roz ChastRecensioni

Wrenching, funny, and painfully familiar. The handwritten memoir reads like a letter from a close friend... with the kind of poignant illustrations that have made Roz Chast a favorite at the New Yorker.

Once you get past the shocking number of swears on the first two pages, it was quite funny for the most part. There were a few things I didn’t like.

“Greta abides by the reasonable philosophy that there is nothing in the universe more boring than someone else's dreams.”
― Elan Mastai, All Our Wrong Todays

When a writer is famous and beloved enough, the old saw goes, they can publish their grocery list and people will buy it. Roz Chast seems to be putting that to the test with this jumble of random thoughts about dreams and recreations of dreams from her dream journals and personal correspondence. And that her book has ended up on several lists as one of the best graphic novels of 2023 (see below) puts me in mind of another old saw, ""There's a sucker born every minute."

(Best of 2023 Project: I'm reading all the graphic novels that made it onto one or more of these lists:
• Washington Post 10 Best Graphic Novels of 2023
• Publishers Weekly 2023 Graphic Novel Critics Poll
• NPR's Books We Love 2023: Favorite Comics and Graphic Novels

This book made all three lists.)

Some were funny, some weren't. That's cartoon humor for you. My favorites:

Trial Balloons in Apartment 3-B (Mom: "Lentils - a tasty, inexpensive alternative to meat.")

Hoax Ethnic Food food cart ("New York's Only Kwzntueaaian Cuisine")

Schadenfruede Monthly magazine cover ("Obnoxious Heiress's Cosmetic Surgery Goes Horribly Wrong! Scads of gruesome pictures, pages 11-15")

The NRA's Written Test for a Gun License ("I'm all for gun safety, but _____________________________ (use reverse side if necessary)" )

The Big Book of Parent-Child Fights (Chapter 1, Food Arguments - page 1. Chapter 2, Bedtime Feuds - page 832.)

Sudden Genius catalog ("#3188: Russian Headbox. Russian mystics have long known that putting one's head in a box concentrates the cranial aura. Easy to use, safe, 100% effective. $124.99")

The Daily Bugle newspaper (Headlines: "$165 Billion!!! Huge Amount of Money! No Doubt About It!" "$80 Billion. Not As Impressive As It Once Was." "$5 Billion. *Yawn*" "$400 Million. So What?" "$100 Million. Nobody Cares.")

Woodwork Clothes catalog. ("#638: Nothing-Special Skirt. How many times have you wanted to just disappear completely? Order your skirt in Ignore, Vague, and Goodbye.")

I've already been through this process with my parents. My father died of lung cancer in his early seventies and most of his caregiving fell on my mother. Then, ten years later, after living on her own alone all that time, her health and mental state began to fail. She took a trip to see me and when she got off the plane, she could walk through the airport, but by the time she left she couldn't lift her leg up onto the curb. She was hallucinating small things, "oh did you see that cat cross the road?" and arguing about things like, "Obama started the war in Afghanistan."

I was putting her on a plane to my brother for my niece's graduation. She took a turn and ended up in the hospital with a bladder infection. We ended up putting her in a memory care senior home near my brother as we realized that her mind was going and her neighbors told us she had lived on her own for too long. I took a job based out of SoCal which allowed me to come down and visit once a month, but the majority of care was on my brother who faithfully took her out once a week for ice cream or nail appointments. She was angry at us because she wanted to go home. She would kick her walker into other patients she thought were stealing from her. She would eat the box of See's Candy and then claim that someone else stole them. She lost her bowels on the way to the bathroom at Outback. Her health continued to decline as did her quality of life until she died. The whole process was heartbreaking. It was only after my Mom died that I could process and remember her for the strong and wonderful mother she had been for most of my life.

No one can tell you what to expect or how to navigate this. This memoir by Roz Chast comes very close to giving you a heads-up. One thing she talks about in the book, which we also found invaluable, is hiring an attorney who deals with elder care. They helped us navigate her finances, her care, etc. They had people on staff who regularly toured the local senior places and could tell us which would be the best for her.

Would I recommend this to my friend whose parents are starting to fail but are still in reasonably good shape to let them know what they can expect? Oh, boy. Maybe.

Would I recommend someone who is in the process of going through this with a parent? Yes. You are not alone. And this is terrible.

Chast is open and unflinching. This is a heartbreaking book about a process that most of us must go through.

Soooooo good!

Laughed myself silly. Just exactly what I needed this week. i adore Roz Chast.

Charming and honestly a pretty good introduction to the city. I appreciate New Yorkers who are cognizant of the fact that "Knowledge (New York)" is not a skill that everyone is born with.

Reminded me a bit of Tokyo On Foot. If there are more graphic novel love letters to urban environments out there, I would like to read them!

This book has an odd schadenfreude quality, because while I am fairly neurotic, turns out I am neurotic about totally different things than Roz Chast and it was honestly kind of pleasant to inhabit someone else's anxieties for a while.

(The one exception is the jello, which I remember vividly despite reading this book months ago. OH GOD, THE HORROR.)

(There is actually a word for this aversion, trypophobia, or fear of things with tiny holes. Whatever you do, DON'T GOOGLE IT.)

(Did you google it? I'm sorry, except not really. See "schadenfreude" above.)

A perfect, hilarious, heart-wrenching graphic memoir, recommended to all humans.

Not the funniest of Roz's, although still quite amusing, but it came with a sleep mask that says "I Must Be Dreaming" which I couldn't resist.

Roz Chast is talented and funny. She has a definite style to both her cartoons and her humor. After reading this short “graphic novel” I have to admit that I didn’t wholeheartedly enjoy it. The comics at the beginning of the book are funnier than the later ones. I’m not sure if she ran out of material, or there just isn’t that much humor to be found in her personal dreams.

This is a book that might resonate more with some people than others, especially if your dreams are similar to Chast’s.

If you’re a Roz Chast fan, you could just take a look (while browsing in the bookstore or the library), and unless you insist on owning every copy of her published works, a quick read will suffice.

The illustrations were colorful and fun, but the subject matter was sort of depressing. It was a good illustrated memoir with moments of humor. The subject of death can be unsettling for a lot of people, including me, but Roz Chast tackled the subject in a way that combined all the caring and humorous moments with the sad and stressful moments.

Roz Chast ignores the old adage that everyone hates listening to details about the dreams of others, and convinces us that not only are hers the best dreams, but that we're so very lucky that she chose to draw and to describe them in such hilarious detail! There are recurring dreams, celebrity dreams, food dreams, body horror dreams, and, best of all, many insouciant birds. And there's basically a New Yorker cartoon on every page, even ones that were rejected. About as much fun as you can have while awake.

#1 New York Times bestselling, award-winning New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast's new graphic narrative, exploring the surreal nighttime world inside her mind-and untangling one of our most enduring human mysteries: dreams.

I SO hope I’m not this mother...but a very funny book

Hysterical, as always

It might be that when you are familiar with years of someone's cartoons, you know them better than an author you've read. And when they write a memoir and illustrate it with their cartoons, you get an unusually honest, penetrating, disturbing and funny look at them and yourself. The author is about my age and her story is even more moving because it is so much like my own.

It felt like a graphic novel, only it was the author's affectionate guide to NYC. The illustrations are definitely the main attraction.

These observations and musings are "spot-on!"

I bought this book when my mother first moved into aged care, with the thought that it might help prepare for what was coming. Not too long after that, my mother-in-law died after a relatively short illness, so I discreetly put it to one side. I didn't really think it was the right book to be reading at that point.

It came to hand when I was idly looking for something to read, so I flopped on the couch and read it in a sitting. Roz Chast's story of her aged parents' reluctance to deal with their declining years and inability to be independent as their health fails is in turns, affectionate, heart-warming, sad and funny. Anybody who has lost a parent is likely to recognise some of the issues Roz goes through.

The book also puts a very bright spotlight on her relationship with her domineering mother; Chast doesn't bother to sugar-coat her family's story and she is willing to recount the good and bad with both of her parents, and with herself.

I have to admit that at times this book was laugh out loud funny. I meekly gave it to my wife to read when I was done; that night she kept me awake, snickering and giggling at Chast's account of death, just six months after losing her mother. So I guess it hits its mark, unerringly.

This book was okay, but not necessarily for me. It is incredibly important to take the time to process grief, particularly if one's feelings towards the person who died are ambivalent. Yet...there were a few parts that I think could have been left off in the publicized version, like the photos of her deceased parents' room (it just felt unnecessarily invasive for me, but others may enjoy it). Also, nitpicking, but I personally just prefer a clearer font if there are going to be multiple pages of just text in a graphic novel.

Cartoonist Chast recounts the final years of her parents' lives in a mixture of illustrated essays and cartoon panels. Though she brings her trademark humor to the situation, it's still a fairly grim topic, and she doesn't spare the details: bedsores, dementia, money problems -- it's all there, along with her grappling with her own mixed feelings about her relationship with her parents and her unhappy memories of childhood.

A thought-provoking read, recommended -- though not, perhaps, if you've just experienced the loss of a parent.

This very short book is written with tongue in cheek, as a college commencement speech might sound if it were realistic, rather than idealistic. I picked this up for a reading challenge book because I needed a book under 100 pages long, and those are hard to find. This one is only 64 pages long...with pictures! The illustrations are by the hilarious New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast were actually the best part of the book for me, which was a tad too cynical for my taste. To be fair, it was written in 2018 when Donald Trump was in office, so liberals were all feeling pretty cynical, then.

Funny (of course) and melancholy (of course). I guess I *would* prefer something more pleasant -- but that's human, right?