I grew up in a New Yorker household. Honestly, it always kind of annoyed me because my parents would not read them efficiently and there were always big stacks of half-read issues around the house. This got worse as they got older. As a kid, though, I did enjoy reading the cartoons and as I got older there were a few articles that I enjoyed. I was generally not into the fiction at all, which the few times I read it, rarely actually had a good story, but was more about some theme or story or some modern American literary nonsense. Roz Chast is a mainstay and I loved the way her characters looked, that frazzled hysteria, but I never totally found them all that funny.
My father died a few years ago and my mother while quite physically healthy for her age (she was always really active and engaged in life a lesson to us all) started to have ongoing memory issues. She herself asked to be moved to assisted living, so that last 6 months of me and my sister's life has been dealing with all that stuff, a situation common to many people at this stage in our life. For some reason, we are called "the sandwich generation" but I think it's been going on forever in various forms in various societies. Anyhow, my sister gave me this book for xmas and I guess it is a minor classic.
It's about Roz Chast's own parents, who lived in the same apartment for Brooklyn for most of their adult lives and all of hers. It's an incredible portrayal of two unique people and the odd family they created. You really get the vibe in both the art and the writing. It's quite hilarious as well, though ultimately sad. She portrays her parents so well. I was laughing out loud at several moments in the way she portrayed her father's idiosyncracies. The storyline is their aging and how it forces them finally to leave their apartment. It's often so sad how life ends this way. People who have found an established home and routine that makes them happy are ultimately forced to leave it behind as they are no longer capable of managing it. This more than anything has made me see that life can be very arbitrary.
She doesn't make a huge point of it, it's implicit in her narrative, but the other major thing this book shows is how stupid America is with dying. It has basically turned into a giant racket to steal people's money at the end of their lives. Fucking stupid Christian obsession with "life" means that many people end their years in discomfort and worse for themselves and econonomic stress and worse for their families. As late-stage capitalism grows more and more voracious, this just gets worse and worse. Assisted living is now a major investment category, most of them owned by big private capital firms. The places are designed to exploit the staff to the hilt, assisted by weak labour laws (drafted by politicians in lobbyists pockets). Same with the medical system which is designed by exploiting and twisting the Hippocratic oath to keep people physically alive as long as possible even if their quality of life has diminished so far it isn't really even life.
I have two friends whose elderly parents have chosen to end their own lives. The American had to travel to Europe and the other was here in Canada where we now finally have humane MAID laws that make it possible. In both cases, while sad as anyone's death is, it was very much the right choice and better for everyone involved.
This is me editorializing above, because Chast's book stays away from any kind of soapboxing. She just tells the story of their end and her experience of managing it. It's not a total disaster or anything and in the end they did lead very long lives. She spends more time on her own challenging relationship with them and especially her mother, who was quite tough and strict. Chast was the weird quirky girl at school who probably didn't have the right clothes. She could not wait to leave home and clearly has done extremely well. But you can see the weird, tough home life that creates the kids who don't fit in.
This is just a great read, but especially for any of you dealing with your own parents situation.
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