by Roz Chast
First published 2014
Cartoonist Roz Chast spent decades avoiding the reality of her aging parents through denial and distraction. When her mother Elizabeth climbs a ladder to retrieve something from the family's "crazy closet" and falls, Chast can no longer ignore what's happening. Her father, anxious and dependent on his wife for stability, slides into dementia. Her mother, a former assistant principal with an overbearing personality that had pushed Roz aside for years, grows increasingly frail. Chast must navigate the role reversal of becoming the parent to her parents. She faces decisions about moving them from their family home to institutional care, manages uncomfortable physical intimacies, handles complex logistics, and hires strangers to provide the most personal care. Through four-color cartoons, family photographs, and documents, Chast chronicles the final years of two lives and her experience as an only child doing her best to cope. The memoir balances tears with laughter as it explores the universal experience of adult children caring for elderly parents.
Genres: family-life, memoir, non-fiction, biography-memoir, graphic-novels-comics
Vibes: emotional-atmospheric, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: found-family, role-reversal
228 pages · Hardcover · Bloomsbury USA
Content warnings: mental-illness