Julia Gets Wise with Roz Chast

Okay, let's say you buy some apples at the store. You're only going to have a rough idea of where or how they're grown. Maybe you throw the cores in a trash can. You're not thinking about where they're going or you try not to. All in all, our relationship to our food can feel disconnected. One way I try to reconnect is by using my mill food recycler. Sure, mill has totally changed my home life in a lot of practical ways. It works automatically. You can fill it for weeks. It never smells. But this part is just as important. When I use mill, I'm participating in a circular system. All the food I don't eat is helping to grow the food that I do. It makes me feel like I'm part of something bigger. And that feels really, really good. And it's all so ridiculously easy. I just drop my scraps in my mill and it transforms them into nutrient-rich grounds overnight. I have mine sent to a small farm, but if I wanted to, I could use them in my garden or for my backyard chickens. If I wanted backyard chickens, and I don't. And, well, I don't know, maybe I do now. Maybe mill is transforming me too, just a little. If you want to feel more connected or you just want your kitchen to feel less gross, try mills, risk-free trial, and just live with it for a while. Go to mill.com slash wiser for an exclusive offer. Hey, it's me, Julia Louis-Dreyfus. We are officially back with a brand new season of Wiser than me. To celebrate you're out of this world's support for our show, we've been brewing up something special. A Wiser than me, mere traveler. It's a versatile, sustainable travel mug to keep your coffee hot and your tea cozy all year round. It's perfect for wise women on the go. Head over to Wiser than me shop.com to grab yours now. Okay, here's the show. If you've been listening to our Wiser than me podcast for a while, you've heard lots of episodes that were recorded with me sitting in my cozy little office in Pacific Palisades, California, surrounded by my beautiful things, momentos, photos of my family and my friends, books that were very important to me, and art that made me comfortable or inspired me or both, definitely both. Well, all of that is gone now. Burnt up in the Pacific Palisades fire at the beginning of the year. It was a fire that destroyed everything in our home, and of course the structure itself. It was a 1929 Spanish revival home built and designed by a painter named George Barker. I remember a long time ago when we drove up to look at that house, 32 years ago. It was a lot more house than we could afford at the time, and we pulled up in front of the house, and I took one look at it and I said, uh-oh. So in these little stories that I tell before episodes of the podcast, and those stories this year, you're probably going to hear a bit about what we lost in that fire, because it's actually, it's totally on my mind. This was a community tragedy for the whole Palisades and Al-Tedina, and to tell you the truth, it's still raw. Every once in a while, I'll think of something, something that I need that's in a file in my office or something, and then I'll realize, oh, God, no, it's gone. It's burned up, it's gone forever. And that just happened to me a few days ago. I love a good cartoon, a good magazine-style, one-panel cartoon. I actually think cartoons are like poetry in a way. Poetry is the most distilled form of literature. The poet has the incredible ability to choose the right words and only the right words in just the right order for a poem. And in the same way, a cartoon can almost magically, in just a drawing and a caption, paint a comic picture that has all the elements, surprise, cleverness, wit, and sometimes even real profundity. But first, they're funny. God, I love cartoons so much that I have what I had a file in my office of cartoons. And now, of course, they're gone. These were not necessarily the best cartoons I've ever seen. Those were in books on my shelf, the Conrads, the Gary Larson's, the Linda Berries, the Ros Chas. Those were just up on the shelf. They're gone, too, but I can replace books. These were just random comics that have made me laugh so I'd cut them out of something. Here's one of them. A caveman is showing a stone wheel with a hole in it. Maybe the first wheel ever to another caveman. The one caveman who appears to have invented the wheel says to the other caveman, what am I going to do with it? I'm going to fuck it. Still makes me laugh. That, ladies and gentlemen, is a great cartoon. I mean, yes, it's crude and it's vulgar. My memory is that most of the cartoons in that file are, but I can't tell you how many times I pulled that cartoon out and made me laugh every single time. In fact, I'd argue that there's much more to that caveman cartoon than it might seem at first, starting with the stupidity of man. Since it burned up, I've really tried to find the cartoon. I've Googled it. I've used AI. I just can't find it. Or I couldn't find it. And then, just a week ago, I was looking through photos on my phone of the house for insurance purposes, which is so much fun, you guys, with insurance and everything around that. And I was going through 2016 those photos. And for some reason, I had snapped a photo of this caveman cartoon. It's yellowed because I probably had it for 30 years, but I mean, there it was. I was very happy to find the fact, similarly. It's not the same as having the real thing. Turns out that the cartoonist is Carol Zahn. It's so odd, the things that are precious to us, isn't it? I mean, not being able to put my hands on that little file of cartoons is just an agony. But that agony makes me realize more now than before the fire, actually. Maybe more, lastingly, how much laughing matters to me. It's just everything, especially a deep, great cartoon laugh. There's nothing quite like it. So how happy I am then that our wiser than me guest today is the great, Ross Chast. I'm Julie Louis-Dreyfus, and this is wiser than me, the podcast where I get schooled by women who are wiser than me.! Few artists have mapped the emotional terrain of modern American life and quite the way, Roz Chast has. Roz has been a contributing cartoonist with The New Yorker since 1978. That's nearly 50 years of nervous characters, apartments packed with way too many lamps and families on the edge of total collapse. In addition to New Yorker cartoons, Ross has written some of the funniest, most painfully honest work about the things no one really wants to talk about. Death, aging, and the daily panic of just being alive. She's taken what could easily be grotesque, dysfunctional moments in life, and somehow flipped them into stories that feel intimate and truthful and funny. And that, my friends, is a big trick. And it's a very excellent trick. She's written children's books with Steve Martin, she's illustrated essays and published collections like Going Into Town and What I Hate from A to Z. Each one expanding her peculiar kind of genius. Truth is, she's just entirely thrown out every cartoon convention. For memoir, can't we talk about something more pleasant, just killed me? It really did. I absolutely loved it. And I can't recommend it highly enough. It's hilarious and it's heartbreaking. Which is why it's one basically every award a book can win, the Kirkes Prize, National Book Critics Circle Award, National Book Award Finalist, and in 2024, President Biden gave her the National Humanities Medal for God's Sakes. What is so striking to me is that Ross can tell an incredibly personal story and make it comical without ever trivializing the subject matter. Her work reminds you of your own life, the difficulties of being a person or her very source material. And somehow, her way of drawing it, writing it, naming it, it's soothing. It's like a salve on a wound. And her mother suddenly regains her appetite close to her death. Ross wrote, where in the five stages of death is eat tuna sandwich. Please welcome a mother, a grandmother, and a woman who's been married forever to a lovely man who, by all accounts, can decorate the hell out of a house on Halloween. Please welcome the brilliant, the wilder, a complete original, and truly so much wiser than me, Ross Chass. Hi, Julia. How are you? I'm good. I'm good. I am such an admirer of you and your work and I feel. Oh my God. I can't believe you're saying that. I feel the same about you. I'm googoo-gaga to meet you. I'm so excited. Well, me too. Me too. I'm like, you know, I'm like, I'm doing the same. I have been an admirer of yours from afar forever. It feels like forever. I just have followed you. I read all your cartoons. Every time your cartoon comes up, I'm fangirling out, but it's the truth. Well, it's totally, totally mutual here. I mean, I've signed felt you were my character. I mean, I just loved it. I loved so much about that character. I loved that it was a girl who's friendships with, like, guys. Like, kind of, awkward guys, but very, very funny. And I don't know. I never felt like there's a lot of shows I feel like on TV that the way that the person acts as a sort of female character. I can't relate to it at all. It's just, I don't know, I don't know what it is. But Elaine, I definitely got. Well, that's the highest compliment. And I'm very happy for it. So anyway, are you comfortable if I ask your real age? Yes. And how old are you? I am now 70. Wow. I know. I know. That was a kind of a, yeah, a biggie. A biggie. How old do you feel, Ross? Ah, I don't know. Some were probably less than that. But I don't know. I mean, because 70 is a, it's so abstract in a way, you know. To say, well, what does 70 feel like? Well, I don't know. I haven't been 70 before. And everybody is so different, you know, the way they age. So I don't know. What do you think is the best part about being your age right now if you could identify it? I think that every moment that I'm not in pain or that somebody I love is not in pain or that I'm not dealing with some crisis just feels like, whoa, fantastic. Whoa, that rocks. You know, like, it just, and you just become more aware as you get older. It's like you're walking through like an asteroid field except the asteroids just get like more numerous and maybe closer to your ear as they whizz by. Yeah, exactly. And you see like friends get hit by them and, oh shit. Yeah. You know, and it's just sucks. It's really stupid. It's really completely idiotic. But you know, what choice do we have? So yeah, you carry on. You carry on. Yeah. So talking about your work, the thing that I just admire and my jaw drops at is how you have successfully cultivated your own sort of inner anxiety into something that is joyful. Do you perceive it like that? Do you think about it like that? Probably not. I don't know. I don't know. I feel like there's some relationship for me between anxiety and hilarity. Yeah, for sure. But I'm not quite sure what it is because it's not usually at the same time. There's like some time gap. It's like maybe it's that everything seems to alternate between like hilarity and anxiety and hilarity and anxiety. And there are funny things that happen sometimes even when you have something that's making you very, very nervous. I mean, I've had laughing attacks when I'm on stage, supposing to be talking about something really serious or something. And then suddenly, I start thinking about something and I can't stop laughing. That's the best kind of laughter and the worst kind of laughter. And you're not supposed to laugh. Oh my God. Yes, totally. I mean, it's like you're on a drug or something. Yeah. And you can't stop. And you can't stop. Yeah. And it gets the worst and worst. And you know you're getting in trouble. Or I remember when I was in high school, I was in this, they called it Glee Club. And we had to sing some horrible song about raising kids. It was like turn around and you're one turn around and you're two or you know, some horrible song. And I became, during the concert, I became hysterical laughing. And I had to put the thing up over my face, the music up over my face. I got in so much trouble. But it's just stupid song. Oh, yeah. I mean, that used to happen to me. There were words when I was a kid, the word pimple made me laugh like a crazy person. And it wasn't like it came up every 10 seconds or anything. But for some reason it came up, it would just make me laugh and laugh and laugh. Have you used the word in your cartoons? Ever? I have not. I did do a cartoon about mosquito bites and naming them because, you know, I guess I'm so boring. I'm allergic to them. So they tend to last a long time. And you can get sort of nostalgic. It's like, oh, there's Sheila. I remember when Sheila, when I got Sheila, and I can still see like the scar and she's going away. I'll miss her. But, you know, our IP Sheila. Yeah. Yeah. Incredible. And what kind of child were you like and can you sort of walk us through, you know, whatever 9-10 year old, Ross, what were you like? I just fucking hated being a kid. Just really hated it. Yeah. You know, I was so weirdo. I was a, you know, and only kid. My parents were super overprotective to the point where they made me feel like, you know, you really shouldn't, you know, kids carried diseases. They were dirty. They spoke with Brooklyn accents. You know, somebody had bad posture and I shouldn't play with them. They were bad influences. They were smarter than me. They were more sophisticated. So they could take advantage of me. You know, this is mostly my mother, not my father. I think felt sorry for me, but he was afraid of her too. I think she was trying to keep me safe, right? Because they had lost a child for you. Exactly. And they didn't want that to happen. So, yeah. Yeah. And I really had no idea how to play with other kids. I was really hated it. Just hated it. Waiting to grow up. I was actually like that myself too. I wasn't, I didn't have those same kind of anxieties, but I couldn't wait to get older. I couldn't wait to get older. Oh, me too. You know, some people love being children. They loved it. And I was not one of those people. Yeah. I have friends who loved being a kid and they tell me about their adventures and things they did and they got to trouble and they did this. And it was like, I never did any of those things. I was not allowed. It was not fun. It was not interesting. I hated school. I was really waiting to grow up. Yeah. Well, I'm so glad we're talking about this because there's a cartoon of yours that I love. It's you as a child lying in bed surrounded by books. Can you tell us about this cartoon? Sure. This is a cartoon that I did. I can't remember what it was. It was for a magazine that asked me to submit a photograph of myself as a child. And for some reason, I said, is it okay if I do a drawing? And they said, fine. So I am nine years old. I'm on my bed. I have a plate of looks like a couple of Oreos or something. And I'm surrounded by books with titles like Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Skurvy. But we're afraid to ask diseases of the tropics. A child's garden of maladies, lock jaw monthly. I was really afraid of lock jaw and gangrene. I had a lot of hypokonvier issues. The big book of horrible rare diseases. And the main book is something that was a book of my childhood that I think forever changed me, which was the Merck Manual, which we had in our house because my mother's sister, my aunt, was a registered nurse. And she would give outdated copies of the Merck Manual to my mother who love to read them. But what is the Merck Manual? Because lots of people don't know what that is. Okay. The Merck Manual is basically for doctors. And it lists every single disease and how to treat it and symptoms. And the suggestions for treating the disease with the different dosages of drugs and stuff, that was way over my head. But I was not stupid. I knew what symptoms and signs were. I knew I had leprosy more times than you could count. I have a 24 hour leprosy, many, many, many times. Were these things that all lived in your head or did you? Yes. You didn't articulate them to your parents. I would try. I would try, but there's just no. My mother would say, the typical kind of thing. She would say, you're depressed. You have a roof over your head. What are you complaining about? Because they were first generation Americans. They grew up incredibly poor, both of them. Their parents didn't speak any English. So to them, I was like, the queen of Shiba. What was complaining about? So how have you managed that childhood anxiety as you've gotten older? Has it popped out in other ways? Have you been able to wrestle it down? I guess in some ways. I ignore it. I mean, I don't cope with it very well. Let's put it that way. I mean, ignore it as in like, I don't go to the doctor. I still have a lot of health paranoia. Even though most of the time I feel pretty good, knock on wood. Yeah, I'm not going to have wood because I'm superstitious. Yeah, me too. We have to do that thing. I don't know if your grandmother ever did the thing where they blow away the evil spirits. Oh, no, but that's a good one. You can do that. Yeah, they would over people's shoulders. Oh, I see. Yeah, like if you were standing right in front of me, I'd go left right and left again. Left right left to a right left right. And that's, you know, you're dispersing the evil eye. All right. You do that at the same time you knock wood. You could do either. You could do both. You could add the salt, you know, depending on, you know, how bad it is. But no, I don't cope well with the health thing at all. And I try to repress it and just not deal with it. And I think, you know, most of the cartoonists I know tend to be sort of anxious people. Yeah. Yeah. It's time to take a quick break. My conversation with Ra's chast continues in just a moment. And by the way, we just launched a Wizer the Me newsletter where you can get behind the scenes details from my conversation with Ra's chast and more. You can subscribe at wizer the me dot sub sack dot com. You'll get photos and videos and letters from me occasionally think exclusive bonus snippets glimpses behind the scenes of the making of the podcast a deeper dive into every guest plus a place to connect with other Wizer the Me listeners. I hope you subscribe at wizer the me dot sub stack dot com and stick around to see what we have in store. Be right back. Get my DIA makes appliances that handle things while you move on with your life like the one touch auto fill French door fridge with a water dispenser that fills your cup perfectly so you don't have to sit there and supervise water. Every my DIA appliance is made for people who already do a lot and especially for those who notice when things aren't working and quietly fix them anyway. 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sort of taking that knowledge in and thinking oh because you know when you're a kid you think oh i hate my mother everybody must hate their mother sure because that was your universe that was like the norms yes you know she was just fucking mean yeah so much of the time she was mean uh-huh and uh i think she was tired she worked really hard and she just didn't want to deal right and i think also you know as i got older you know i think that losing that first baby really did her in sure you know understandably so so i don't know maybe that's a misreading of the situation i don't think that's it doesn't sound like a misreading to me it's like the trauma was the fuel that that sort of kept her in place in a weird way as as a mom this trauma just was yeah the driver yeah i think it really kind of ruined a lot more than well certainly more than i was aware of um when i was a kid yeah because i didn't even know until i was 12 oh how did that come up i was in the garage of my mother was the driver in our house my father was too anxious to drive so we're like leaving the garage and sitting in the back seat and i asked my mother tell me something about yourself you've never told me before oh and she told me and it was like well that's something i didn't expect wow so she've been carrying that you know herself and uh and when she told you Roz did she tell you in a matter of fact way was she emotional telling you about it um i don't exactly remember she would get emotional later but at the time she told me i don't remember her being particularly emotional i remember it just being like well yikes yeah were your parents i don't think your mom was funny was your dad funny um not intentionally he was extremely anxious and sometimes his anxiety was funny to me um in in the moment in the moment oh yeah and they were and they were funny to me in a weird way even though they didn't intend to be like they would have these crazy fights and i don't know they were just so um it maybe they were just very typical for like children of immigrant first generation american mm-hmm people i think in a lot of ways but they would just have these arguments and fights and um you know about how many olives my father should eat and you know like he would he would want five olives and then she'd say George are you crazy and then he'd say okay i won't have any olives and then as she'd say no you just have olives and you know or like you'd be sitting on the chair in like this way like that she didn't like and she'd say George sit straight you're twisting your kishkas you know and kishkas being intestines for people don't know um and uh you know just like these insane sort of discussions and but they they were funny in this way that was very old-fashioned they told jokes oh not my mother did not my father but my mother would tell you know in all of their friends you know they told those kind of uh herman goes to the doctor la la la punchline yeah yeah yeah right and i know your dad carried around that new yorker uh yes or actually was it a new yorker cartoon or no from the saturday review i think it was about new yorker cartoons tell what it was it was i don't know who did the cartoon but it was somebody at their uh shrinks lying on the couch typical shrink cartoon set up and they were the uh caption was the patient telling the shrink i feel inferior because i don't understand the cartoons in the new yorker so my father loved this cartoon he carried it around my dad passed away uh i don't know 10 years ago or something now and uh he used to just go on and on about other people i was working with about how how good they were yes yes yes so and my father would ask me sometimes like very strange questions like what sort of fellow is then he'd name some cartoonist that i didn't really know that well i don't be like i think he's nice i don't know why are you asking i don't know yeah yeah that's so funny and how does it work at the new yorker like are you on staff can you just talk us through the actual process of all of that and what your role is in it i am under contract so in some ways it's staff but also it's there's no guarantee of anything and i don't make a salary so it's also sort of freelance jesus yeah so you mean so they only pay you when they take your cartoons yeah wow yeah exactly exactly there's probably about 40 or 50 people maybe more who submit regularly and by regularly i mean like submitting every week is that you every week yes yes every week and you don't submit one cartoon you submit a group which since i started has been called the batch and so if you're talking to some cartoonist it's like did you send in your batch yet how's the batch going the batch yeah so i usually aim for like six or seven cartoons and um you know let's say there's 50 people under contract and just to make the math easy let's say 10 cartoons it's 500 cartoons and then another like at least thousand maybe more coming in over the transom wow and they only buy between ten and twenty a week so it's from fifteen hundred cartoons to ten to twenty a week which is why if somebody says you know my niece or nephew or my kid they want to be a cartoonist you know what do you have any advice i always say if they can do something else they should do that they should do another thing you know don't do this this is really when you don't have anything else that you can do you know you this is what you do you have anything else you can do no no no nothing nothing i mean you've been doing this since what 78 right yeah 1978 okay so what have you learned i guess i've learned that maybe i'd rather do this than not do this oh i hear you and the thing about art one thing that's really good is that unlike being an athlete or a dancer you can continue yeah there's it's not like right yeah you i mean you can just kind of keep making work and i do find that working knock on again would there's always always new stuff yeah there's always new stuff to learn and always you know new inspiration and new ideas and things to get excited about and um i mean that that is life for me yeah i mean do you do you this is i have to say before this is like just jumping a little bit here yeah sure hook that um the the last fuckable day is one of the most brilliant things i have ever seen every line is so yeah hilarious oh good so great and is it you that goes out off at the end with the cigar yeah or no no yes it is it's it's me i go off in the canoe in the canoe yes yes every bit of that is just the greatest how did that come about well that came about because let's see it was for Amy Schumer it was for show and Nicole Hollis Center who's a writer director with whom i was to read yeah well she directed that particular sketch so she called me and she said doing this does this appeal to you and i'm like i mean the title alone and the concept it was like brilliant and so i said 100% and so we went off into some woods somewhere and we and we shot it it was really fun too because we got to improvise and play with it and the baby lamb that like i don't remember it was Tina facing like some 80 year old like guy like married not just somebody who's 20 somebody who was 24 years younger and it was actually a baby lamb and oh i died that was just so so and everybody's oh yeah exactly yeah not even mad it's like so stupid it's so stupid i think that's the key is that the reason that that really did work is because people weren't mad about it no at all yeah we've just um in a weird way almost delighted yes it's like good now you're not pestering me anymore now i'm not like with your just uh it just every note it hit was just great it's like thank god nobody's asking me to walk around with my you know it's out to here and like here comes here comes the sex bomb you know it comes titty magee yeah you're that's titty magee you know i know i know the whole wants that and then you see these like you know 75 80 year old like people who are still like being titty magee and you just like what are you doing like i don't know i don't know it just cracks me up like it makes you happy then go ahead yeah go ahead i know oh i'm so happy you like that i really i really am do you ever say no to projects do you like the people come to you and said i don't know what it would be but it's like it doesn't appeal to you it's like gross or i don't know what it would be i probably should have said no to more projects no no um well i i asked like i'm such a prostitute it's like well what's your budget you know you want me to do a commercial for like tin foil you'll be great in a commercial or tin foil i got news for you i will buy so much tin foil if you are hacking tin foil oh i would love to it's like all the things you can do you can just like quit your job make one of those tin foil balls just like and then open up like a store where you sell them tin foil balls store and then you could like do like different things you could make like cubes and pyramids and it's like that's your life is just now tin foil craft i am here to tell you but you have got this gig wrap i know i'm like waiting now like maybe alkoa or whatever the company is rental trap rental trap will call me up after this and say we never thought about that like and etsy adjacent craft adjacent and i just i don't know it's just with rental trap you know come on over let me get hot we can make it too yeah and tin foil balls we can turn it into a necklace yes exactly exactly that is the necklace okay we need to take another break here more with rouse chast right after this spring invites a reset windows open shelves cleared only what's useful and well made captain rotation closets can follow the same rule fewer pieces better pieces nothing wasteful if it's not versatile thoughtfully constructed and built to last it doesn't deserve the hanger that's where quince stands out elevated fabrics clean cuts and pricing that makes choosing quality over quantity feel both 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Canada too don't keep settling for clothes that don't last go to q-u-i-n-c-e.com slash wiser for free shipping and 365 day returns quince.com slash wiser hey it's hussaminhaz here from the hussaminhaz doesn't know podcast among other things and i hate the smell of rotting food almost as much as i hate wasting it in the first place thankfully now i have mill mill as a food recycler that is odorless guiltless and completely effortless see i've always wanted to reduce my food waste it is one of the easiest ways for an individual to make a big impact on the environment but i just cannot stand the mess of a compost bin in the kitchen but with mill all you do is drop in your scraps and you let it go it works quickly and quietly turning your food even small bones into nutrient rich grounds now i take out the trash way less yet my kitchen smells way better and i don't have to feel guilty when my zucchini gets moldy plus it looks cool yeah this trash can alternative is so fly people keep asking me where i got the giant Alexa it's chic and savvy but you have to live with mill to really get it good thing you can try it risk-free for 90 days right now and get seventy five dollars off with code hmdk visit mill.com slash hmdk that is mill.com so you've been married for how long we married in eighty four so whoa four d what year is it twenty five forty one years forty i don't something like that yeah yeah something like that so what was your courtship like well our first date was a racer head oh really yeah midnight show at the elgin so yeah wow did you like him right away yeah i did i did i actually thought that he was too normal and too cute for me and i and i thought so that's always a good sign so you had lived in New York your whole life and then after you had your second child you moved to Connecticut and i know that was a very rough transition right leaving the city well yes and no i have what a friend of mine calls a pumbitaire in the city uh-huh i got eleven years ago and i'm in the city a lot i'd say three out of five weeks i'm in for a few days oh i say because i mean i really i think the hardest thing about moving out of the city was the driving well one of the hardest because i didn't learn how to drive till we moved out of the city and i really hated i really do not like cars i don't like driving i don't like putting gas in my car i don't like the noises it makes i have like car hypochondria you know where it's just like what is that smell what is that sound what is that is it supposed to be doing that and yes what kind of car do you drive may i ask it's a Subaru Forester from 2008 yes and i i vaguely like it because i sort of know how to turn it on and i know it's like weird things and i'm afraid of like new cars i don't like the button cars oh yeah the button cars are tough i think that's a big transition i hate hate hate i will not do that i will not do that um because you live in fear of not turning it off because it's starters that's that's it and yes even people who are like oh what are you afraid of with a button it's so easy they sometimes like oh i forgot it is it on or off they're not sure oh and that's like really creepy to me i just i like it i don't like anything about it i i it's yeah so being in the city is like you don't have to drive you can go anywhere so you do add everything you can to avoid driving like would you have somebody else it yeah okay oh yeah yeah um um and and then you became a parent in the suburbs yes yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah and so talk about that i love the story you told about somebody giving you you were the parent something or other and they gave you ice to break up oh yeah that was awful you know there's a lot of people who have somehow they know how to do everything like this and i was at one of those horrible uh field days you know they have for kids and the parents so all playing outside yes and somebody gave me this giant bag of ice to break up and i had no idea how to do this and she just like sort of took it away from me like dropped it a few times on the ground and you know sort of wordlessly but just disgusted you know with you with me yeah when you told that story i thought i have to tell you this story which is i was at my my kids school and it was like pilgrim day or something and we and i know already already you're unhappy yeah and some mother had made a bunch of cookies in the shape of i don't know colonial things i'm not sure i can picture the hats yeah and the kids were going to decorate them and i was sort of bringing them over to the kid table and i dropped like a plate and a few of them you know sort of crumbled and she looked at me and she goes try not to break the cookies like that wow i wow try not to break the cookies yeah i was like oh yeah that's such good advice yeah yeah because i was really planning on going through them one by one i wasn't before but now i will yeah tell me about it right because before when we were living in Brooklyn i remember i was in a playgroup and the other mothers did other things you know they were like they were they had other jobs besides being a mom but when we first came out here it was like planet isonhower you know it was just fascinating you know by the time somebody was 35 they had like three kids and maybe like a kid who was like 12 you know it was a different thing and their husbands had like corporate jobs and their excitement was like redoing their house or redoing their kitchen or having a pool put in or gardening or but it was weird you know being a freelance person i tried i would sometimes be a class mom or yeah did you ever do that like yes i did i was the class mom for the like where i would organize the kids to make sort of a group art project and then it would get raffled and so we did some kind of neat things it was fun to that i kind of like and there was always this um tension between mothers who are always available for school always available and then people like me who i was not always available and then i felt unbelievably anxious and guilty about that yeah same same how did you get through that and did you find a person or anybody that you could you did i did i had i had a very good friend who actually i just saw she came over on Halloween so we're still friends but she's a painter and the people shocker of shocks the people that i became friends with were generally artists so uh-huh you know they were people who had like other pulls on their time and their attention and because you know i think when your mom there is this kind of weird part of you that's maybe something in society that just says you give up everything you're a mother you must drop everything and just be a mom and if you're not that then there's something wrong with you i mean i know you talk about you parented your first child one way and your second child a different way right yeah i did i did because when i only knew two modes which were screaming and hitting which i was not either of those things and being a dormat and i was more of a dormat and passive and that didn't work either and i learned a lot from a couple of very good parenting books i tried to i not i'm not a self-help book reader ever but i had a sort of like a crisis moment with my older kid in a grocery store when he was around five where usually i was so anxious that my husband was very laid back you know he's one of three kids from the midwest and just a much more sort of laid back sort of person and he got along very well with my son because he would let him do things like climb up really high in a tree because he felt confident that if he fell he could catch him whereas i didn't you know so he could go to the park with him and yeah my son could do all these kind of crazy stunts that i would not let him because i would just be seeing like ambulances and blood and you know horrible things the bones sticking out from skin and you know death death um anyway uh we were in the in the grocery store and uh i decided i am not going to be my usual don't do this don't do that self i'm going to be more like my husband more laid back and sure you want to spray remember like there used to be like vegetable sprayers with water and it'd be like a hose oh yeah you know and i'm gonna let him do that you know sure you can do that um i'm gonna let you like pick up products i'm gonna and at the end of the at the end of this trip i'm like sweating bullets you know it's just like i'm i'm keeping all of my anxieties all of my sure this is fun this is really great look it's fun he did something he's like started swinging the cart and he let go of the cart and it went into this whole thing of like glass jars there's glass everywhere there's glass and sauce and it was a huge disaster and it wasn't like one glass it was like many many many many many jars and it was servings that your fever anxiety dream came true oh yeah we left the cart um we i said to my son i said i'm so angry i cannot even speak and we went home and he ran upstairs and i was telling my husband about this and i was ultimately i was crying and laughing like snot just pouring you know because it was funny but it was so horrible and i was so angry and so upset and also because i had gone against my instinct of like trying to control and the next day i went to the library and i took out a bunch of books you know all everything that i could find about how to do this and i found two really good books which books i'm so curious to know one was called um how to talk to your kids will listen and how to listen so your kids will talk which i just thought was so good and it was wonderful book wonderful book and it was something that i had that book oh it was just so good and what was the other one stop struggling with your child it was called and they were both very similar in that it was some it was a third path it was not being a doormat but also not screaming and hitting and yelling and just losing a third path a third path um and some of it was just about good things to remember when you're bringing up kids like don't blame but you can just like the wet towel is on the bed not like why are you so lazy you've left the towel you always do this not like accusing and starting a fight and if they don't get it you pull it and if they go so you bring them back you point you can say it like really direct the wet towel is on the bed and they put it together the jacket's on the floor you or jacket is on the floor you know and i i need you to come to my house i need you to come to my house it was great it was so good and it really helped it helped a lot so it's funny because i had i still have a lot of anxiety as a mom and i love being a mom of course but i don't know how i would characterize my anxiety except to say that i am always trying to keep it at bay yes yes same which is it which takes a lot of energy can we just say that maybe it's just i don't know whether it's encoded genetically you know for me might having very anxious parents and yeah you know i don't know if there's anything i can really do about it it does seem like this is probably how are you even pregnant as be i mean were you a basket case for your pregnant yes i was a basket case and i um i do think that my body must have secreted some sort of anti-anxiety hormone to kind of because right now when i think about it it's like how did i do that like that's so horrible the idea of a person inside of you i i much preferred labor to being pregnant you know because at least that was like getting it out i'm getting it out there's doctors something goes wrong something in whatever but pregnancy it's like there's the whole person it's just it's the horrible thing you're growing a person it's disgusting there's like eyeballs there's like another set of eyeballs inside of me i don't like that um but you know so that's why i think there must have been like some sort of weird like calm down razz hormone sort of being i'm sure you know i'm sure that that is actually the case when you you know your hormones are all going so crazy when you get when you're pregnant anyway that there is probably something that i mean it's just it got you through it you did it you did it twice to me it's like a miracle to have a relationship with my kids that i did not have with my mother so i am grateful to them every day yeah that they've allowed that yeah and you've obviously done something to cultivate that so that you do have a relationship i mean for example you went and you got the parenting books i mean you worked at it yeah yeah i did not assume that i knew everything because i knew i didn't you know and i think that was different from i don't know if they had that when my parents were had had me i mean there was doctor spark but there was doctor spark but i think that even when i was growing up i think that parenting wasn't yet a verb i think you're right i think that happened in my generation as a apparent and in your generation when you were a parent yeah oh yeah but i think that that became a verb later i think you're right yeah speaking of parenting as a verb we have another cartoon of yours that i'd love to talk with you about it's the um cartoon about the sex talk oh my god does this make me laugh so hard can you read this for the listeners this cartoon yes this is a heart to heart talk it's a mother talking to her teenage young teenage daughter and she saying in my day it wasn't like nobody did anything but certain things you only did with certain people i'm not talking about certain things i'm talking about certain other things nowadays it seems like people do certain things with people because they think that those things are less intimate than certain other things rather than vice versa and we know what those things are oh it's so great that is so wonderful that is a marvelous cartoon that really made me laugh did you have those conversations with your kids uh i think only when forced to you know they're kind of uh i i i don't really remember um i think i probably did it somewhere i had with my daughter who is now actually my son i have a one kid my younger kid is trans uh so i might have had some sort of talk like that with her that went along with um the need to use deodorant that yeah sort of thing i i had um with one of my sons he was very he was youngish and he was using the word um hump a lot and i said to him honey do you do you know what that word means because it was inappropriate right and i said you know what that word means he goes no and then i sort of took the opportunity to tell him what humping was and and and how sex worked and i told him pretty sort of scientifically kind of any i remember we were in the car and he looks at me and he just goes why did you just tell me that you know what i just suddenly remembered when you were describing it the sex talk i had with my daughter tell me oh my god i mean that it was as weird almost as weird as that it was um it was because uh she at the time was in maybe like third grade or something and some little girl in the class told her that if a boy held her hand it would put a baby in your tummy and she was very upset about this so then i thought okay i have to tell her like yeah about the whole situation that and i just for those of you who are listening i just made that like horrible like junior high you know bar mitzvahan gesture of finger going into home yeah finger going at all and after i finished describing like what things where things went she looked at me and she said i feel like i'm dreaming you're kidding swear to god i feel like i'm dreaming and i want to think i'm dreaming i feel like i'm dreaming and i wanted to tell her yeah yeah it does kind of it is like that exactly that's adorable that's adorable i love that i feel like i'm dreaming it's time for one last break don't go anywhere we'll be white back i do want to talk about your memoir because it really it it is so um helpful and honest and helpful in the sense that because i you know my dad passed away and my mother-in-law is is very aged and with caregivers so we're sort of in the throes of yeah yeah and um is there anything that you wish you had known in the beginning of that caregiving adventure that you had oh man i don't i don't know i don't know whether it's better to know about it in advance or you know because there's aspects of it that are just so awful off that maybe it's better not to know you know there were things that were very helpful like a friend of mine connected me with an elder lawyer and that was an extremely helpful thing um because you had trouble talking honestly and openly with your parents about end-of-life decisions and so on and so forth yeah yeah yeah it's just awful and it's it's weird i'm kind of i'm going through it in a much more muted way with my aunt right now my mother's baby sister who is now a hundred and six what the hell yeah it's crazy it's crazy she is uh she's outlived both of her kids and of course everybody else um but she's and she's okay i mean she uses a walker and she's hard of hearing but she's mentally you know she's she says oh i'm more i'm forgetful and stuff but she's very much still there i mean she's in a home she is yes last September um i she was living independently until a year ago September and i got her into an assisted living place nearby and sold her house and you know all that stuff i'm i'm amazed that you've had you had to do that after having to having done this with your parents it's different though first of all she was much more pliable pliable pliable and she had taken care of a lot of things like she had a lawyer that i would work with a lawyer sometimes my parents never addressed any of this yes and uh i have this card on the refrigerator that has you know the name of the funeral home and um yeah like she wants to be cremated and this is the company and this is like you know the numbers for when i so uh yeah it's different but it's just it's so i don't know i guess not to be like soapboxy about it but it's just like one way that i feel like our society just doesn't really give a shit you know about like if you are if you don't contribute to the economy why don't you just fuck off and die you know why don't you just be dead right now because if you're not making money if you're not contributing to the economy of this country it might as well be dead yeah there's really no system in place you know other than nothing yeah other than family and and if you're lucky if you're lucky you have means to figure it out right but it's an expensive undertaking oh yeah I mean she had a little house in New Jersey and that is slowly going to her care right now i mean slowly it's like you know 10-11 thousand dollars a month which is still good compared to a lot of places i mean they really know these places it's almost like a black comedy they know they have you over barrel yeah because they do because they do you know there's no they'll just take it all and i and with my parents i mean it was particularly hilarious in a kind of black comedy way because they were children of the depression and had grown up so poor and they were such uh squimpers and savers and they would come up here and my father would say so what are they charging for fig newtons in your area and you know i couldn't tell him it was like if they were 22 dollars i'd know but like are they 349 or they 419 or they 299 i don't know um but they were such penny pinchers and self deniers and you know no you can't have that you can't have this you can't have that you know and and then at the end it all it all went oh so that was that was that well i think that the i have to say that if anyone who's listening to this is in that situation i would recommend reading your book i mean i mentioned it in the intro to you but i i think it's a good salve for the kind of wound that is opened up when you have to really truly take over in terms of caregiving for a loved one i think your your book was very helpful did you write that book after i mean my father died in 2007 and my mother died in 2009 and it was published in 2014 but i was starting to get this idea that i think i want to write something about this because it was such it was all like new information to me yeah you know i just had no idea how much a person is on their own dealing with end of life care right how much it's like you and your parents and you're on this little boat and there's nobody around yeah when my dad died and the end of his life was a bit of an agony and and then once he was dead there was sort of a new way to frame him it was sort of like all the sudden you knew the whole story of him and and i remember speaking like at a service that we had for him and i could sort of talk about him now that he was gone in a way that i couldn't when he was alive i guess is what i'm trying to say yeah i think that there is something about that that you don't see things until until they're gone i don't know where you see it in a different way maybe more fully yeah or something yeah and maybe you also understand that you're next and that's you know you understand on this sort of really intense level that just gets more and more intensely older you get that this is life mm-hmm sounds like such a cliche but that's kind of what it is you know yeah but is it kind of freeing maybe yeah it is kind of freeing in a way i guess that's no matter what you do this is how it ends you know i know your parents even though there was funkiness there they were very close to each other i guess you would say very very and what what was your takeaway from that in your own marriage um i think i have a different sort of marriage um my parents were very much each other's like they had a blended very much of a blended world they really as i wrote and bowed in the book they did everything together they were never really apart and uh like the idea of taking a vacation separately from your traveling solo to someplace or traveling with a girlfriend or whatever or whatever would never have occurred to them they barely went to the grocery store separately they did everything in lockstep and i don't have that relationship i i sometimes wonder what it would have been like whether that would be good but i don't think so um i mean i don't think so either yeah yeah i think one of the reasons why we've been married a long time is that you know he adores Halloween i'm not so into it it's not like you know some crisis that we need to throw a hundred thousand dollars at a couples counselor about it's like um you do this and he's not a big fan of new york new york is my life um i mean he's joked that the great love affair of my life is with new york city which is true i just love it so so so much i do too you know i sometimes feel embarrassingly in love with it and like i want to say no i'm not being paid by some like tourist association i just i adore it um but he doesn't feel that way so and i have an apartment there and i go there a lot and it's okay yeah yeah so yeah oh well i just can't tell you what a delight it is to talk to you honestly what a great conversation um okay i'm gonna ask you a quick little couple of questions and then i'll let you go okay yep so um is there something ross in your life that you would like to go back and say yes to yeah around 1979 or 80 i was with some friends and they were going to some club downtown to hear this new singer uh that was apparently very good named Madonna and i said yeah i'm tired i'm going to go home oh yeah yeah okay i'm glad about that um is there something that uh you wish you'd spent less time on hmm cooking even less even less than now i'm guessing people in your family might laugh at that you know maybe because they would say it's not like you spent like that much time mom you know still remember rock pizza which was do you know those like that that pills buried dough that comes in the thing in the yeah break it open it goes blue yeah you know it's like a biscuity piece dough yes it's a biscuity dough and it has a certain chemical taste because it's all like and it's chemicals it's all chemicals but somehow every time i made it the the dough came it it came out very hard and my kids would call it rock pizza so yeah yeah so maybe less time i'm cooking is a good idea yeah yeah and is there something you're looking forward to yeah thanks giving oh that's nice yeah everybody the kids are going to come where they're partners in the families and so yeah oh that's lovely i don't really like thanks giving food to be honest with you but i like being together as a group yes very happy yes i like the colors i do like Thanksgiving food actually i like i like that uh the way the cranberry sauce looks and speaking of colors i want to just end by telling you one thing so i have this i got to get my phone to hold on don't move i'm not moving i'm not moving so i went to the farmers market on the weekend and i got flowers because i'd like to have flowers around and i was getting ready to talk to you and i was looking at these flowers which are zinnias i had them in a vase and i thought you know this reminds me of raw's chast because it's your colors and even and even the flowers themselves look like you to me it looks like flowers you would draw and so i just wanted to tell you that that you remind me of zinnias well thank you thank you i i'm taking that as a compliment i love zinnias it is a compliment yeah yeah they're great flowers they're great flowers they're hardy and they're very colorful yes and um i can't tell you how much i've loved talking to you today well vice versa this was really a pleasure this was really fun so thank you okay i just have to call my mom she has been so looking forward to my conversation with razz since i told her that razz was coming on the show so let's get around the zoom now hi mommy i love hi mother i spoke with razz chast today and you can only imagine how charming and fantastic she is i want to marry her yes you do and i want to marry her too because that is how wonderful she is for rils everything she does is wonderful i've never you do you know what i mean yeah she's just everything oh and by the way i read a memoir of hers i thought i read sometimes that she had a baby sister that they never talked about she had a sister who died before before she was born and here's what's so fascinating so i said did were you aware of the fact as a kid that you had had a sister who died before you were born and she said well i found out when i was 12 and i said how did you find out and she said well i was in the car with my mom and i said tell me something about yourself i don't know yet and her mother just told her in that moment can you believe what i just told you that is incredible can i ask you that question maybe another time okay yeah maybe it's not for public consumption yeah we're gonna say for our listeners i'll plant a secret recording device and i'll let you know which is it so listen um one thing we talked about was this particular cartoon that i'm gonna ask our folks to pull up right now and i had her read it aloud mom and this is her heart to heart talk look at the look at the face of the the mother and the daughter so this was her this was the sex talk her mother had with her look at the face look at the face of the of the girl on the on the sofa she's just miserable so mom do you remember do you remember sex talks that we had growing up do you remember any of that well i don't i don't remember that did we have many now that's what i was wondering i think we have yet to tell me how it works yeah well i think leave you alone you would find out um yeah i think that was it that you left us alone and we all found out eventually i guess well i figured that you could tell you could tell each other and that would it be a help and you had some good friends so that one oh that was a huge shortcoming of mine that was i mean just in terms of communication because i was i mean my parents never mentioned my mother never mentioned sex to me except to say that only men liked it and that was that was her talk to me and then i never really had anybody to ask large you know talk to my friends and i sort of learned what whatever i learned and uh judie and i would talk about it and we would try to get books about it and and then we would sometimes ask her father because her father was we would talk to us about sex but you know we asked such funny questions which was how long does it take that's a legit question and so he told us 20 minutes um so i always thought 20 minutes 20 minutes was the time here's here's your watch we made the cleanliness of now you've got it now you're all finished well you know when i was little and i had my friend Jessica and somehow we got it in our heads that fucking meant if two people sat on the toilet at the same time and went peepee so we so she and i when we had to go pee we'd go sit on the toilet together and go pee i mean that shows you how tiny we were that both of our bottoms would sit on top of the toilet and we would pee and we would call it that we were fucking oh it's language wonderful yeah i mean the the whole what the word opened up in you it just the whole that that that's the whole universe there that you know it's just that's so marvelous okay my mommy well um so there you go that's Ross Chast well i'm so it was it's just a i'm getting i'm getting floating blessing from you for from her just because thank god for the people like that isn't it i know isn't it the true and it's your your featuring somebody like that and uh it's it just should be known and known and known yeah yeah i feel lucky that today was a lucky day yeah okay okay love you love you my mom i love you too and i take care and i will see you soon okay okay bye yeah executive producers are Paula Kaplan Stephanie Whittles-Wax Jessica Cordova Kramer and me the show is mixed by Johnny Vince Evans with engineering help from James Sparber and our music was written by Henry Hall who you can also find on Spotify or wherever you listen to your music special thanks to Will Schlagel and of course my mother Judith Bowles follow wiser than me wherever you get your podcasts and if there's an old lady in your life listen up