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Roz Chast
Writing & Creativity
Roz Chast is an American cartoonist and memoirist whose work includes New Yorker cartoons and an illustrated account of her parents’ final years.
Biography
Roz Chast, born November 26, 1954, is an American cartoonist and a staff cartoonist for The New Yorker. Since 1978, she has published more than 1,000 cartoons in the magazine. Her cartoons also appear in Scientific American and the Harvard Business Review.
Her first memoir, Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant?, combines cartoons, family photographs, documents, and narrative to recount her parents’ final years. It explores her changing responsibilities as an only child, including arranging care and coping with her father’s dementia and her mother’s forceful personality.
Chast was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2010. She received the Rhode Island School of Design’s Alumni Award for Artistic Achievement in 2017 and was awarded a National Humanities Medal in 2024.
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Books by Roz Chast
Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant?
Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant? recounts the final years of Roz Chast’s parents through four-color cartoons, family photographs, documents, and narrative. With humor and grief, it examines changing family roles, the move from home to institutional care, caregiving logistics, and the loss of elderly parents.