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
I think I have a habit of, in my head, taking notes on whatever, you know, whether they're verbal or pictorial or just making a note of things as they're happening.
There's something about most phobias where there's a tiny, tiny corner where you think this really actually could happen.
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.
It cracks me up to see these ads for TV - for Depends or for glue for your dentures. The people in them look 55 with a hint of gray. Where are the people who are falling apart? We don't see that.
I have an African gray parrot; her name is Eli. We thought she was a boy. And a blue-streaked lory named Marco. He's 10. And a yellow and green parakeet, Petey. He's very cute, but he's getting old.
My works were not - and they still aren't - single panel gags with a punch line underneath them. I like a lot of those cartoons; I just don't draw them.
I had to get good grades and do well in school - my mother was an assistant principal and my father was a teacher - and they took this very seriously.
I putter. I nurse old grudges. I fold origami while nursing old grudges. I think about the past. I wonder if there's any grudges I should start.
Grime is not like messiness or some fingerprints on a cabinet; it takes a long time to accumulate.
Childhood - that was not my favorite time in my life.
I always imagined my little cartoons on plates for some reason.
You would open a drawer, which my father had jammed full of newspapers, and the bottom would drop out. There were buttons and screws and nails and bottle caps and jar lids – the drawer of jar lids! Why? Because they're made of metal and maybe there'll be another war and we'll need the metal. A friend of mine – I quote him in the book – says, 'You have found the source of the river eBay.'
I noticed that I used to go to second hand shops and flea markets and find funny, cute things, but now I go into those stores, and I think, This is dead people's stuff. This is all, like, somebody cleaned out their parents' house, and I don't want any of it. If I didn't want it from my parents, I don't want it from your parents.
Even under the best of circumstances - in twenty-first century America at least - caring for elderly parents ain't no place for sissies.