Roz Chast
Roz Chast
Rosalind "Roz" Chastis an American cartoonist and a staff cartoonist for The New Yorker. She grew up in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, the only child of an assistant principal and a high school teacher who subscribed to The New Yorker. Her earliest cartoons were published in Christopher Street and The Village Voice. In 1978 The New Yorker accepted one of her cartoons and has since published more than 800. She also publishes cartoons in Scientific American and the Harvard...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionCartoonist
Date of Birth26 November 1954
CountryUnited States of America
Did you know that you can live on Ensure for a year? A person can live for a really long time just lying in bed and drinking Ensure - way longer than you think.
I've always wanted to learn how to hook rugs. A wonderful artist named Leslie Giuliani taught me how. The nice thing is you can change it as you go along.
I used to think of the cartoons as a magazine within a magazine. First you go through and read all the cartoons, and then you go back and read the articles.
Sometimes, you know - I think, with a lot of things, at the time, everything is extremely upsetting, and then you look back on it, and it actually can be sort of funny.
You might have a worry that's so stupid it just peters out by itself, like a bad investment.
Being female was just one more way I felt different and weird. I was also a young 'un, and also my cartoons were not like typical 'New Yorker' cartoons.
I don't put myself through that nauseating experience of looking at someone's face while they go through your stuff. Ugh! It's just horrible! It gives me the cringes to even think about it.
I'm sure that my parents' behavior has entered my work, I'm sorry to say. I don't think you need to have a difficult childhood to be funny, but it helps.
I don't like anything that looks gelatinous - really weirds me out. But when I was a kid, I used to get very, very upset if anything had a kind of chalky texture; like, certain kinds of cottage cheese I know have a weird chalkiness.
It was deeply interesting to observe my mother closely and to draw her. During those last months, she wasn't speaking much, if at all, and it was a way for me to be with her. It felt very natural.
It's like a 'chicken or the egg' thing. We're all part of the culture. We're reflecting it; we're changing it. So, yeah, I think culture is always changing.
I think when your parents die, it is kind of like a moving sidewalk: you're not just on the sideline and watching them go by. You know, you're going to the same place they are.
I think, with my cartoons, the parent-like figures are kind of my own archeypes of parents, and they're taken a little bit from my parents and other people's parents, and parents I have read about, and parents I dreamed about, and parents that I made up.
You could pray all you want that you have a massive stroke while you're working and die, but possibly that won't happen, and you'll be in this bed, and somebody's going to have to clean you up.