The finalists for the National Book Awards have been announced and I find myself in the same position I’m in most years, where of the two genres I love most intimately (nonfiction and poetry), I find that I know all of the poetry books, having read the books themselves or multiple previous volumes by the poets, yet I haven’t read a single of the nonfiction books. And weirdly, among my circle of essay-enthusiastic friends, the book that has triggered the most conversation and optimism is Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, short-listed for poetry. I haven’t even read Citizen yet and I already think it’s one of the best books of the year. The poetry list seems robust and varied, while the nonfiction list seems at first glance less interesting, and is annoyingly dominated by white people and men.
Normally, I just kind of take this as a given. I don’t put much stock in awards, and I’ve accepted that the genre of writing (nonfiction) lauded by this particular award is different than the form of writing (essay) that I geek out about. Not better or worse, just different. These are generally books whose titles are followed by colons and many words, and I like things where there’s a lot of white space on the page and everyone talks about their feelings and the paintings they look at.
This year, however, I decided it would be fun to read through the nonfiction finalists, approaching them with curiosity and optimism. I’m starting with Roz Chast’s Can’t We Talk about Something More Pleasant?
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Chast’s work is a graphic memoir, which distinguishes it quite a bit from the other finalists. It tracks only-child Chast’s relationship with her nonagenarian mother and father in their final years. Chast is a cartoonist for the New Yorker, and her squiggly lines and quick wit are familiar and distinct. The book manages to be heartbreaking, terrifying, and ridiculously funny. Like the actual kind of funny, where you laugh and put the book down for a moment. The word that keeps coming to mind when I want to describe it is honest, which is a weird word, a word that I couldn’t reasonably use here as I have no ninety-year-old parents, have not lost a parent, and do not know Chast.
I think of Williams’s line, “no ideas but in things,” which I’m taking out of context and misusing in the way people constantly misuse that line. Around the center of the memoir Chast moves her parents into an assisted living facility. She does this after the mother falls and the senile father, trying to get help, wanders through their apartment building and gets lost. Chast then must confront the task of unpacking their decades of possessions from their home, and for a few pages switches away from illustration to photographs: unreasonably cluttered desks, drawers of pencils, a medicine cabinet with more than one packet of ammonia inhalants, a “cheese-tainer” in the fridge. I went over these pages four or five times before I was able to continue.
I’m not sure what honest might mean here except that it’s the ideas in the things, in the way the parents are just constantly arguing and Chast isn’t particularly generous to herself as a daughter. She states, matter-of-fact, her own recurring interest in having both parents die in order to save money on their exorbitant medical and daily care. Honest like a dirty cheese-tainer, or honest like the description of the mother shitting all over her house the night her father dies. It’s also relevant that her parents more or less refuse to talk about death or prepare (other than financially) for the reality of their final days. Chast tries to approach the subject several times, but they both shut her down, hence the memoir’s title. So there’s little of that grappling with death in the way that we might expect from a memoir or from nonfiction. Instead, there’s the squiggly lines, which say as much.
When the mother finally dies, her nurse goes to fetch a staff member, and Chast writes “I was alone with my mother’s body for a while. I drew her. I didn’t know what else to do. I had been drawing her all summer, since the conversations had been reduced to almost nothing.” And the book closes (sparing an epilogue) with twelve drawings of the mother, spare black ink on cream. The final is labeled “My mother died tonight at 8:28.”
After reading the memoir I walked to a taquería with the guy I live with and we talked about our parents aging and how we are and are not prepared for that. When we got back I showed him the photographs of the apartment and wanted them to resonate, but they didn’t, not without the context of the memoir. They were just pictures of dirty desks. I lent him the book so that he could look at those photographs and understand the idea that is in them.