I could wake up and never have another idea," says Roz Chast. Unlikely, since Chast has been a cartoonist for the New Yorker and other publications since 1978, but such is life for someone who channels anxiety for a living. Chast's squiggly-lined drawings depict domestic scenes that have changed along with her life; while her early work reflected life in the city, her more recent cartoons are about family life in the suburbs. Her jokes make light of people's insecurities about appearance, relationships, moneymaking, parenting. According to Chast, her work comes from the place where anxiety and hilarity intersect. In "Mental Baggage Claim," unremarkable characters stand in the airport watching suitcases roll past. A thought bubble attached to a middle-aged man says, "Excuse me, I think I see my resentment of physical beauty." A woman thinks, "Those lifelong regrets about stopping ballet when I was ten? Those are mine." Chast has recently published Theories of Everything: Selected, Collected, Health-Inspected, a compilation of over 500 cartoons from her twenty-eight year career. Nerve spoke to the artist from her home in Connecticut. — Sarah Harrison
How did you learn to draw?
You know little kids just draw all the time? I just didn't stop.
It was just kind of a gradual evolution, like handwriting. I can remember being in grade school and looking at some girl's drawing and saying, "Oooh, I like the way she draws shoes. I'm gonna take that. So, you know, it's a little bit of that, and a little bit of how you naturally draw.
Speaking of kids, what do yours think of your cartoons?
I think they get a kick out of it. My daughter's having some issues with math right now, and I have mixed feelings about those cartoons now,
because she was just telling me, "Mom, I fell off the math cliff." It's really weird when you have a kid in high school and they're starting to ask you questions about why they have to learn about cosines. You just feel like the biggest hypocrite on earth.
What kind of fan mail do you get?
I used to get more, before email and computers. Most of it is from rational, nice people. But just last week I got three biblical tracts, for no reason. I think it's not personally me. It's possible that they just picked ten people at random from the New Yorker table of contents.
Somebody from Indonesia sent me this wonderful statue. I can't remember the name for it, but it's like a guardian spirit. The person who sent it to me said, "This character looks like one of your characters," and it does. It has this funny expression on its face. He advised me to put it in a high place, so I have it on a high shelf in my studio. People put them in trees so they can look down on them.
How autobiographical is your work?
It's a mix of a lot of things. You know, some of it is more specifically autobiographical, some of it is pretty general, some of it is stuff I made up totally.
Does writing personal cartoons ever make you feel overly exposed?
No, not yet. Unless you're writing some weird fantasy thing about dragons in the Middle Ages or something, there's always that risk. You think, "Oh, is this too personal?" Especially with humor, which is a little aggressive. It's like, "Ha ha ha. Something you did or said, I find amusing, and maybe you don't."
The New York Times described you as "chronically anxious."
I get myself wound up about things. Sometimes I look back on it and can't believe I got that wound up about it. It's an ongoing sort of situation, listening to that little voice inside your head that replays things over and over until you find exactly the spot that's going to make you most uncomfortable. Like I'll probably replay this conversation in my head and think, like, "Uh, huh."
I've been trying to figure out your sense of humor.
Oh, you know what E.B. White said about analyzing humor. "It's like dissecting a frog. Nobody is much interested and in the end, the frog dies."
