A Memoir by Roz Chast, in Words and Cartoons

Roz Chast feels — and draws — our pain. Our neurotic worries and genuine fears, our mundane and existential anxieties, our daydreams, nightmares, insecurities and guilty regrets. Or, rather, she does such a funny, fluent job in her New Yorker cartoons of conveying the things that keep her up at night that many readers are convinced that she is somehow mapping their own inner lives.

It hasn’t been hard to discern the autobiographical impulse in Ms. Chast’s work. Though her earliest cartoons tended to be more conceptual, many of the later ones in her “selected, collected, & health-inspected” anthology “Theories of Everything” (2006) are clearly informed by her experiences as a daughter, wife and mother.

In her latest book, “Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?,” Ms. Chast tackles the subject of her parents, writing with a new depth and amplitude of emotion. Her account of growing up with them in Brooklyn as an only child and her efforts, decades later, to help them navigate the jagged shoals of old age and ill health, is by turns grim and absurd, deeply poignant and laugh-out-loud funny. Her fondness for the exclamatory (expressed in capital letters, underlined words and multiple exclamation points) is cranked up several notches here, and her familiar, scribbly people go from looking merely frazzled and put-upon to looking like the shrieking figure in Munch’s “The Scream” — panicked and terrified as they see the abyss of loss and mortality looming just up the road.

Artists like Art Spiegelman (“Maus” and “Maus II”) and Marjane Satrapi (“Persepolis,” “Persepolis 2”) have shown how the graphic novel can be a vessel for powerful memoirs dealing with the personal fallout of history — the Holocaust in the case of Mr. Spiegelman’s father, the Iranian revolution in the case of Ms. Satrapi’s family. With “Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?,” Ms. Chast reminds us how deftly the graphic novel can capture ordinary crises in ordinary American lives, how a mixture of cartoons and photographs and text can create a family portrait with all the intimacy and emotional power of a conventional prose memoir.

The complicated, conflicted relationship between aging parents and their artistic child depicted here may remind readers of Philip Roth’s “Patrimony” and Martin Amis’s “Experience.” At the same time, the portrait of filial love and duty in “Can’t We Talk” will resonate with baby boomers grappling with their own aging parents — from worries about their safety, to the resurfacing of ancient family arguments, to nerve-racking dealings with hospitals and nursing care and hospices.

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Ms. Chast’s descriptions of her parents are so sharply detailed that we instantly feel we’ve known them (or lived with them) for decades: her bossy, impossibly stubborn mother, Elizabeth, and her gentle, worrywart father, George, who were in the same fifth-grade class, and who, “aside from WWII, work, illness, and going to the bathroom,” did “everything together.”

For decades, George and Elizabeth continued to live in Brooklyn (“Not the Brooklyn of artists or hipsters,” but “the Brooklyn of people who have been left behind by everything and everyone”) in the same apartment where Ms. Chast grew up. The “to-do” list of her unhappy childhood and adolescence, she recalls, included exhortations like “Avoid contact with other children” (because they might have germs), “Look up symptom in Merck Manual” and “Do not die.”

After marrying and moving to Connecticut, Ms. Chast says she spent the 1990s avoiding Brooklyn. She began to realize, however, that her parents “were slowly leaving the sphere of TV commercial old age” (“SPRY! TOTALLY INDEPENDENT! JUST LIKE A NORMAL ADULT, BUT WITH SILVER HAIR!!!”) and moving into “the part of old age that was scarier” and harder to talk about.

Her parents didn’t want to talk about death or “this aging thing.” They didn’t want their daughter to interfere in their lives, or discuss options like “assisted living.” After her mother spent time in a hospital, Ms. Chast “worried about them CONSTANTLY,” and some of her worst fears were realized: One morning when her mother fell down and her father couldn’t pick her up, “he left their apartment to find a neighbor and somehow got lost in the building.” At that point, “even they had to admit that maybe it was time to make some changes.”

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Ms. Chast pulls no punches here. She chronicles her mother’s bad temper and noisy assertions (“I don’t want to be a PULSATING PIECE OF PROTOPLASM!”) and her insistence on stocking up on useless bargains (like Quintuple Queen-size lobster bisque stockings because they’re 80 percent off) while scrimping on necessities like a safe, reliable new space heater.

She chronicles her dad’s lifelong habit of chain-worrying, and, as dementia began to set in, his penchant for nonstop, stream-of-consciousness chatter (“Our neighborhood has become very Pakistani, but a new doughnut store opened up recently”) and his paranoid fears about someone stealing his precious bankbooks.

Ms. Chast also chronicles her own flailing efforts to deal with her parents and their fragile health — not fond trips down memory lane, but acute feelings of anxiety, worry, frustration and being completely overwhelmed. She writes about moving her mother and father out of their home of 48 years, and about the decades of stuff left behind in their apartment — geologic layers of unopened mail, takeout menus, old books, old clothes, old Life magazines, empty Styrofoam egg cartons, antique appliances and equally ancient Band-Aid boxes and jar lids.

She writes about trying to comfort her increasingly addled father — who can’t remember anything for more than three or four hours, including the fact that his wife is in the hospital — and his sense of panic at being without his beloved Elizabeth. After her father’s death, Ms. Chast writes about her mother’s life alone, and the increasingly strange stories she would tell as her “brains were starting to melt.”

Ms. Chast wrote down all those stories, and she also did a series of drawings — somber pen-and-ink sketches of her mother near the end of her life. Along with her cartoons, her photos and her text, these elements come together to create a powerful collage memorial to her parents — an attempt, at once, to come to terms with them and to remember the daily churn and comforts of their lives.

The ashes of her parents, Ms. Chast writes at the end of this affecting book, now reside in a closet in her Connecticut home: “The thought of burying their cremains in an arbitrary hole in the ground does not appeal to me,” she writes, and “decanting them into a decorative urn placed on the mantelpiece in the living room is just ... ugh.” Her closet is “not a super-neat closet, but it’s not messy,” she adds. “I think it makes a nice home for them. Every time I open its door, I see the boxes and I think of them.”