"Revelatory . . . Few graphic memoirs are as engaging and powerful as this or strike a more responsive chord. Chast retains her signature style and wry tone throughout this long-form blend of text and drawings, but nothing she's done previously hits home as hard as this account of her family life . . . A series of wordless drawings of her mother's final days represents the most intimate and emotionally devastating art that Chast has created. So many have faced (or will face) the situation that the author details, but no one could render it like she does. A top-noth graphic memoir that adds a whole new dimension to readers' appreciation of Chast and her work." - Kirkus Reviews, starred review
“If you’ve ever wondered about the origins of Roz Chast’s quavery, quietly desperate, antimacassar-bestrewn universe, look no further. This grim, sidesplitting memoir about the slow decline of her meek father and overpowering mother explains it all. Bedsores, dementia, broken hips—no details are spared, and never has the abyss of dread and grief been plumbed to such incandescently hilarious effect. The lines between laughter and hysteria, despair and rage, love and guilt, are quavery indeed, and no one draws them more honestly, more…unscrimpingly, than Roz Chast.” —Alison Bechdel, author of Fun Home and Are You My Mother?
“After I read this brilliant book, I urged all my friends to read it. Now I have moved on to strangers. So take this book to the cash register this instant. You won’t regret it.” —Patricia Marx, author of Starting from Happy and Him Her Him Again the End of Him
“Reading Roz Chast has always had the quality of eavesdropping on a person’s private mutterings-to-herself. In this memoir of a most wretched time in her life, Chast is at the top of her candid form, delivering often funny, trenchant, and frequently painful revelations — about human behavior, about herself — on every page.” —David Small, author of Stitches
“Roz Chast squeezes more existential pain out of baffled people in cheap clothing sitting around on living-room sofas with antimacassar doilies in crummy apartments than Dostoevsky got out of all of Russia’s dark despair. This is a great book in the annals of human suffering, cleverly disguised as fun.” —Bruce McCall, New Yorker cartoonist and author of Bruce McCall’s Zany Afternoons and The Last Dream-o-Rama
“The wryest pen since Dorothy Parker’s.” —O, The Oprah Magazine
“The wacky world Roz Chast has created in her cartoons is a parallel universe to ours, utterly recognizable in all its banalities and weirdnesses, but slightly askew.” —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
“The magazine’s only certifiable genius.” —David Remnick, about Roz Chast at The New Yorker