The Truth Behind the Cartoons 
 A typical Roz Chast cartoon, such as you might see in the New Yorker: a group of savings bank advertisements from the fifties, offering rewards for new depositors. But this is not the humorist's imagination; these are real giveaways found in her parents' apartment after she had finally moved them to an assisted living facility. And there were bundles of bankbooks to go with them, treasures that had to be hidden from disguised Nazis who would break in and steal them. 
 For this is something unique in my experience: not a cartoon collection (though many are very funny), not a graphic novel, but a memoir. A memoir by a daughter dealing with one of the most emotionally draining experiences of all: guiding her parents through the last years of their very long lives. The book is dedicated to George Chast (March 23, 1912 - October 17, 2009) and Elizabeth Chast (April 3, 1912 -- September 30, 2009), her parents, children of Russian Jewish immigrants who has known each other almost all their lives, and lived in the same apartment in Brooklyn for almost all of their sixty-plus years of marriage. 
 I have read reviews of this book from readers who have had the same experience, or who are still going through it. But I am missing that personal connection, because my mother died in her prime, and I was an ocean away and no longer responsible for my father when he became incapacitated. But what strikes me is what an intimate view this gives us of Roz Chast itself. People often tell jokes as an alternative to bursting into tears, and there are certainly jokes in plenty here. But they do not come between the author and her reality, they intensify that reality. And not merely in the context of this book; they act retrospectively to explain almost any Roz Chast cartoon one has ever seen. You look at them now with the shock of recognition: "So that's where that's coming from!" 
 With so personal and real a subject, mere cartoons would not be enough. Chast includes photos of her parents and of herself as a child. In the middle of the book, after she has moved George and Elizabeth out to a facility near her own house in Connecticut, she includes a portfolio of photographs of all the things she found in cleaning out their apartment. Some, like the page illustrated above, are almost like photographic versions of her own cartoons. But in succeeding pages, the implied humor moves to a kind a horrible chaos--jumbled drawers, junk-strewn rooms--and finally to heartbreaking pathos: a row of hangers in a closet holding clothes that will never be worn again. At the very end of the book, after the photos and cartoons have served their purpose, Chast includes a portfolio of twelve pen and ink drawings of her mother on her deathbed. The humorist has gone; so has the family archivist; what is left is the daughter, using her primary medium, drawing, to record her dying mother with an objectivity that is more affecting than anything else in the book. 
 Though this is not quite the end. There is an epilogue, with three pages of cartoons about the problem of what to do with her parents' cremains. Then two more pages, without a drawing in sight, simply hand-written text, as she struggles with the strangeness, not only of coping with their deaths, but of that whole complex relationship that is parents and children: 
 For as far back as I can remember, I felt far outside my parents' duo. There were many times, from when I was a little girl until just a couple of weeks ago, that I was sure I was adopted. I have to admit, though: if they had adopted me, they had done a sensational job of covering their tracks. Adoptees or not, they were my one and only set of parents, and now they are gone, a fact that feel indescribably strange, even four and six years after their deaths.