Roz Chast – Author Biography
Roz Chast is one of The New Yorker‘s most beloved cartoonists — and the author of Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?, the graphic memoir about her parents’ final years that became a New York Times bestseller, a National Book Award finalist, and one of the most honored graphic novels ever published.
Early Life
Rosalind Chast was born on November 26, 1954, in the Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, the only child of an assistant principal father and a mother who ran an elementary school office. A classic only child, she spent her youth drawing, reading, and observing the anxieties of her fretful parents — material she would mine for the rest of her life. She studied painting at the Rhode Island School of Design, graduating in 1977.
Career
Chast sold her first cartoon to The New Yorker in 1978 and has been a staff cartoonist there ever since, publishing more than a thousand cartoons. Her work — anxious, neurotic, hilariously specific — made her one of the magazine’s signature voices, collected in books like Theories of Everything (2006). In 2014 she published Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?, a memoir in words and drawings about the long, guilt-ridden process of caring for her aging parents. It was a phenomenon: a number-one New York Times bestseller, the first graphic novel ever shortlisted for the National Book Award, and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. She received the National Humanities Medal from President Biden in 2024 and the Thurber Prize for American Humor the same year. She lives in Connecticut.
Major Works
Chast’s defining work is Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? (2014). Her cartoon collections include Theories of Everything: Selected, Collected, and Health-Inspected Cartoons and What I Hate: From A to Z. She also illustrated The Alphabet from A to Y with Bonus Letter Z! with Steve Martin.
Writing Style and Themes
Chast’s cartoons are instantly recognizable: spidery hand-lettering, neurotic protagonists, and jokes built from the granular anxieties of everyday life — dentists, real estate, family dinners, the apocalypse. Her great theme is worry itself: the Jewish-Brooklyn fretting that is both her subject and her engine. Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? elevated the cartoon memoir to literature, treating eldercare, guilt, and grief with a honesty that is funny and devastating by turns. Her work argues that anxiety, fully inhabited, is a form of love.
Legacy
Chast broke barriers for cartoonists — her National Book Award shortlisting proved graphic memoir belonged in serious literary conversation. Her memoir became the definitive book on the sandwich generation’s impossible task, resonating with millions of adult children. Four decades into her New Yorker career, she remains one of America’s most distinctive comic voices: the patron saint of worriers everywhere.
