This topic that you took up in the book, Why Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant? was literally something your folks would say to you if you tried to talk to them about—

Roz Chast (RC):

No, it was more my father. That was his expression that he used a lot if any unpleasant topic came up, like death, or my mother liked to talk about illnesses a lot, people who had this, they had that. They were feeling fine, then their ear hurt, then they were dead. She loved that. My father would say, "Can't we talk about something more pleasant?"

RP:

I see. The book was a finalist for the National Book Award two years ago. It relates in hilarious and heartbreaking fashion the last few years of their lives. And how they never did really ever want to confront their mortality.

I think they didn't believe in it. It was like, if you talked about [it] maybe it would happen. You just didn't talk about it.

RP:

You're in that classic sandwich situation, where you had teenagers at home—

RC:

Right. Kids at home and my parents in Brooklyn…I grew up in Brooklyn and when I got out of college I moved back to New York and I lived in Manhattan for about ten years. When we had two kids we moved out to Connecticut. Going from suburban Connecticut to the middle of Brooklyn, which is where my parents were…They didn't live just right across the river, like Brooklyn Heights. They lived in, in the book I call it "Deep Brooklyn," where you can get there by subway, but then you have a 10-minute walk from the subway to their house. It was hard to get there. It was not something that I could do regularly, especially with two littler kids.

RP:

My recollection is that you hadn't been there very much at all. 

Was that [a] bad memories kind of thing?

RC:

I think it was that I really did not want to, because these were not happy years for me, being at home. I had no nostalgia for that time of my life, when I lived at home. None whatsoever. It was very inconvenient. I had two little kids. I did not know how to drive, I didn't learn until I was thirty-eight. We moved out to Connecticut. My driving skills are very limited. I can drive maybe a twenty-five mile radius around my house. That's with the GPS and only under certain circumstances. I hate it at night, I hate changing lanes, I hate making left turns. If I haven't driven there before, it just takes a lot of talking myself into it. It is just ridiculous. Going into Brooklyn was not something I was going to do. I would have to involve my husband, who didn't really want to do it either, because he didn't get along that well with my parents.

I was working, I was busy. On the weekends, the kids had their activities. There was always a reason that I didn't do it. Then, at a certain point I remember it was…because the World Trade Center was hit on a Tuesday. It was on a Sunday before that that I just suddenly [said] "Oh, my God. I've got to go out and see my parents." I've no idea why it was that particular day. The only reason I remember it is because with the events that followed, less than thirty-six hours later. Yeah, I saw them then.

RP:

In my family my mother was living alone in Florida. Then, one time my nephew went to visit and as soon as he got there, he called his father, my brother, and said, "You got to get down here. Something's wrong." The house was a mess. Did you have a moment like that?

RC:

It wasn't quite from white to black overnight. It was more like when I visited them, I realized that they were quite old and they were very tired…It wasn't like it was a lot messier than my childhood, because they were never particularly house proud. Not all of the disarray and the weird stuff had to do with senility or old age. That was just there all along. But it had definitely gotten worse.

Something I've always thought about my whole life is how I ended up in the arts. Neither of my folks could afford to go to college. Yours were college grads. I don't know if you've ever thought about this, that you ended up in a life in the arts. Artist was never on the list of okay things to think about as a career. I wonder if it was the same in your family. In mine it was doctor, lawyer, teacher, in that order. Those were the only possibilities.

RC:

From the time I was very little I drew. I think some of that was because I was an only child and my parents were a lot older. It was a way to keep me occupied. They would just give me paper and a pencil and say, "Here." I just drew and drew and drew. I think that they probably thought—no, I know that they thought I was going to become an art teacher. Because they were teachers themselves. My father was a high school teacher. My mother actually was a teacher for many years and then became an assistant principal. I think they thought I was going to follow in the family business. I allowed them to keep that illusion as long as necessary. Yeah.

RP:

I love the story you told about going with your parents to some summer teachers’ convention.

RC:

That was at Cornell. My parents used to go in the summer with a bunch of other Brooklyn schoolteachers up to Ithaca, New York. This group came together and they would all go up there and rent student housing, cheap. They would go to lectures during the day. Most of these people were childless. My parents would park me in the browsing library at the student center. They had a section there that was just cartoon books. That's where I discovered Charles Addams. I don't remember seeing him in The New Yorker, because I was probably too young to pick up The New Yorker at eight years old. It's not that appealing. I was obsessed with his books. They really made me laugh.

RP:

You must've been a little weird eight-year-old to laugh at Charles Addams.

RC:

I was definitely a weird eight-year-old.

I don't know. When I was growing I just seemed to always go in that direction of drawing and drawing things that made me laugh, drawing things that sometimes made other people laugh. Mostly it was what made me laugh. I think because I was generally pretty upset. Laughing was very important.

RP:

I think it's interesting, because it's not just funny, but dark also. It's a combination that makes your work so special.

RC:

That's the kind of humor that appeals to me. It has to have something very dark in it. I don't even understand so much humor that doesn't have something dark in it.

RP:

The New Yorker art critic, Peter Schjeldahl tells the story of his first job at Art News back in the 60s. He was talking to the editor about becoming a critic. The editor said to him, quote, "What makes you think you have the right to publicly discuss another artist's work?" He always remembered that and kept it in the back of his mind as he pursued his career. You decide to submit a portfolio to The New Yorker. Where do you get the confidence to do that, or the chutzpah?

At that point I was selling some cartoons to the Village Voice and to the National Lampoon. It never occurred to me that I was going to sell to The New Yorker. I just did it because I thought well, I should try. My goal, if I had a goal at that point, was to be a regular cartoonist for the Village Voice, because they publish Jules Feiffer and Mark Alan Stamaty and Stan Mack. I knew that my work was—I don't know if I would've used the work idiosyncratic. But it didn't really fit in with underground cartoons, it didn't really fit in with The New Yorker cartoons. It didn't really fit in that many places. But I thought, "I'll try The New Yorker, because they're not going to take anything anyway. What do I have to lose?" It really wasn't even chutzpah. I just was sure I wasn't going to sell anything.

RP:

But you did it anyway.

RC:

But I did. I was very surprised. I'm still surprised.

They took something. I was absolutely shocked. I look back and I think I know…This is a stupid thing to be glad about, but I always signed my name "R. Chast." I know it wasn't because they thought oh we need a woman on the staff. When I went to meet the editor, maybe that didn't hurt. This was in April of ‘78 and at that point, I remember the first time I went to The New Yorker, I went to the art offices and everybody looked so old and they were all guys. They might have been 35, but when you're 23, everybody over…I couldn't tell ages. 35, 50, 65, it all was the same. They were all men. It was really very weird. Maybe, the editor, Lee Lorenz, it's possible that at some point he may have thought, maybe we should have a younger person on the staff here. I think that maybe those things worked in my favor. I don't know.

RP:

It occurs to me that it's come full circle. Bob Mankoff is retiring. You're the old guy.

RC:

Now, I'm one of the old guys. Yeah, absolutely. It's crazy. Now there's people who are working there, a couple of them are younger than my own kids, which is totally nuts. They look to me like I know something. It's like really?

RP:

It's so funny, because I look at the new crop of cartoonists that they have and I'm having a hard time. I don't know how you feel.

RC:

I like a lot of them. I do. I like a lot of them personally. It's funny. There's an aspect of it that I think is maternal. I want to take care of them, not so that it gets in my way, because then I kill the young. I know inevitably that's going to happen. That's the way it is.

RP:

No anxiety about it?

RC:

I have total anxiety about it. Are you kidding? It's awful. Bob is retiring and now we have this new editor who is about the age of my kids. First female editor. It's a little unsettling, but you just hope that they like you. That's one of the things about working for a magazine. It's that you are a whim of the editors. That's the way it is. That's just the bottom line, the rule.

RP:

Yeah. I have a friend who's done a lot of covers for The New Yorker and a lot of illustrations for ten years.

RC:

Oh, Owen Smith. Sure. I love his work.

RP:

Yeah. He teaches at CCA here. He's a good friend. He hasn't done anything for two years. They just dropped him.

RC:

So horrible. You don't really know why. That's the awful part of all of this. The way it works is that they never let you get secure about it. I'm anxious every week when I submit a group of cartoons. I get rejected all the time. And I have worked it out in my head, so that no matter what happens, I'm anxious. If I don't sell a cartoon, I'm very unhappy, because then it's like they don't like me anymore. That's bad. But if I do sell a cartoon, that's better than not selling a cartoon, but it's also bad, because then they're one step closer to getting sick of me. It's better to just not think so much about that, if you can. Of course, I can't.

RP:

I'm always amused when David Sedaris talks about how his family's furious with him and threatens to never see him again, because he's always telling their personal family stories in public.

RC:

It helps when they're dead. Let's put it that way. Yes.

RP:

How about your children?

RC:

When they were little, I could get away with the stuff. As they've gotten older I try to ask their permission before using something.

Audience:

I'm just curious how your work week goes. Do you keep a regular schedule and are you always jotting things down? Are you basically working 24/7, it doesn't shut off with ideas? How do you structure your week?

I'm either never working or working 24/7. I can't decide what it is. It's always a gray area. I'm on a weekly schedule for The New Yorker, because it's a weekly magazine. There's an art meeting once a week, usually on Wednesdays. Tuesday night is my deadline. I have to turn in a group. In fact, I don't have to, because if I don't, then I just miss the art meeting, nobody gets mad at me. But then I lose the chance of possibly even selling one cartoon. Every week I turn in, for some reason it's called the batch. We all turn in a group of cartoons. For me, it's usually between six, eight cartoons every week, sketches. Yes, I jot things down all the time.

Audience:

When did you come up with these characters, the slope shoulders, no neck? When did that character become part of what you do?

RC:

I just looked around me. I think it's all grown very organically for me. You draw what you know, that's pretty much what I know. The sloped shoulders. Bad posture. Yeah.

Audience:

Do you think of a funny line and then draw it?

RC:

I would say 90% of the time it's a fragment of a phrase that there's something there that's getting to me. Then I have to doodle it out and see whether it leads anywhere.

[Audience Question]

RC:

The question was about branching off into other media. I have odd hobbies, like these textiles. I did do an animation pilot about twelve years ago. I'm really glad it did not work out, because it was terrible. I haven't given up on it, but it's different. It's very different. When you do cartoons as a cartoonist, you are pretty much working alone and nobody's investing any money in you. You're very free to try a lot of different things.

For me, one of the nice things about doing a weekly thing for The New Yorker is that I do six or eight drawings every week and there's always or almost always one in there that is really totally weird. That's like collage or something that they're just never going to take. It's a way for me to experiment and just push my boundaries and occasionally push their boundaries, because once in a blue moon they do take it. Then I am like, "Yes!" I feel like I'm always experimenting a little bit. I have to. It's part of the fun.

RC:

I really love other sorts of projects. In fact, I got obsessed with doing an embroidery project partly because I went to see an exhibit in Nantucket of this woman who did these embroideries of Moby Dick. They were so jaw-droppingly, astonishingly beautiful that I felt very inspired. I thought okay, embroidery thread costs like fifty cents or something. It's not like I'm painting some giant canvas. I can experiment with this. I can see. I wound up doing this embroidery as a New Yorker cover. I don't think they've had an embroidered cover before. It will be for the Mother's Day issue, so that should be coming out in a couple of weeks.

Hopefully they won't get something in the meantime and decide to pull it, because it happens every once in a while. I hate to even mention it, because I feel like now the evil eye will cause somebody to send in a better cover. They're like, "we were going to run it, but then this happened."

The other question was what happens to the rejected drawings in this batch. What happens is most of them go into filing cabinets, or at this point they're piled up on top of the filing cabinets, because the filing cabinets are full. But, they don't go anywhere. I often use them as resources for when I'm doing the next batch. Sometimes I look at the old drawings, especially, if it's a drawing I really like. Every once in a while I'll submit it just as is. But more often than not, I'll think of the way that it could be made better and I'll redraw it and rework it and resubmit it. I'm starting to think about divesting myself of stuff. If it's a terrible drawing and dated, I'll just tear it up.