Roz Chast Draws Her Life, and Ours

Whatever drifts into Roz Chast’s mind, it seems, drifts out again in words and pictures, distilled, yes, but unaltered.

In a sizable exhibit at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, MA, Chast’s dreams, and memories, and regrets and darkest worries are reckoned with on paper, many washed in candy pinks and greens; and her people — grumpy, ecstatic, bemused, all outlined in ink — draw museum viewers close. As though they want to be part of Chast’s stories. 

Like any real artist, she hides nothing.

After all, who is not afraid of tunnels? In a series of images titled “What I Hate From A to Z,” that includes Tunnels of course, she lists Alien Abductions (which she half hopes are real, but is afraid of, too) and continues with Carnivals, General Anaesthesia, Kites, going on to Premature Burial, Quicksand, Spontaneous Human Combustion, Undertow, X-rays, Things That Are Yellow, such as journalism and teeth, and at Z, just start over, she tells us. Fears from long ago, like the notion that the bathtub was going to fall through the floor, do not fade for Chast. She may laugh about it later, sort of, but she outgrows nothing. It all becomes the stuff of stories and images, she tells us, in a lovely video interview at the show’s entry.

In it we learn that Marco, a red parakeet she portrays in a deep-sea-diving suit, or on skis, or eating triangles of a bird-seed-and-ketchup sandwich, is very like the bird who sits on her shoulder as she talks to the show’s curator, Stephanie Plunkett.

“That’s mommy’s necklace,” she tells her bird.

Chast is fair and birdlike herself, with straight blonde hair and large eyeglasses framed in red. She says she always drew as a child and demonstrates the way lefties leave their images on a page, her wrist bent, pointing the pencil downward.

Still, after graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design, Chast had no idea of what she might do for a living. She determinedly steered clear of following both parents into teaching; as for drawing, she was a “terrible illustrator”; she was “scared of cash registers” and she had trouble following instructions.

But one day she put together a portfolio of 60 cartoons, clipped a business card to it and delivered her work to The New Yorker. One week later she had sold a cartoon. 

“They told me to bring something every week.”

So for years now, Chast has been hiding out in her studio on Mondays and Tuesdays, doodling, thinking, playing, remembering, making cartoons for The New Yorker. And during the rest of the week she works on other projects, like books.

She has spent a lot of time thinking about her parents lately; the father she adored, the mother she dreaded, her efforts to please and sometimes avoid them.

“I was not a happy-go-lucky kid. But things that made me laugh were good.”

Now she makes other people laugh, as in a series of Things Youth Does Not Want To Know: How much it cost to clean the rug last week, the rug upon which youth has just dropped a big splotch of food; What parents got for an allowance at the same age as Youth; Or what a dollar bought in 1957: a house, says the father, 50 trips to Hawaii, the mother claims.

In the galleries, visitors edge close to Chast’s images, laughing out loud sometimes. Many of the stories are pitiful, like the fellow saying “my novel will be a bestseller and then my parents will respect me.”

Among the drawings there are a few photographs, one of Chast, who looks to be 12 or 13, with her parents. They are smiling. Her face is blank, staring at the camera, and in a balloon she has added, “Just a few more years and I am outta here.”

Among the most poignant pieces in the show are those from her just-published memoir about helping her aging parents, titled “Can’t we talk about something more PLEASANT?” 

They could not address matters such as money, estate planning, end-of-life directives, which left Chast uncertain about how to help them as they faded into illness, senility and death. 

Chast has a large Wheel of Doom in the gallery, featuring death, deafness and blindness in the outer circle; water in the ear, choking, gangrene in the middle circle and in the inner circle: swimming without a cap, laughing during a meal, edging too close to the TV and sitting directly on the ground. She simply turns the fears and ticks and hurts that swamped her as a kid into images and stories that make us laugh. Sometimes in recognition.

Roz Chast: Cartoon Memoirs runs at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, MA, through Oct. 26. For information, call 413-298-4100 or go to nrm.org.