BY way of introducing her parents, Roz Chast opened her closet door and rummaged through some stuff on the floor. This is where she keeps them, amid miscellaneous boxes and general bedroom marginalia: her mother's ashes in a maroon velvet pouch; her father's in the Channel 13 tote bag he took with him everywhere.

"I like having my parents in my closet," is how she explains it in her new graphic novel, Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant?, which chronicles the pair's long, precipitous decline, starting from when her mother fell off a stepladder in 2005 to the time she died, in 2009 (Chast's father died in the middle of all that). "I think it makes a nice home for them." It is almost shocking to meet Chast, whose cartoons so often feature a chronically frazzled woman of her own general appearance, and find no visible rays of anxiety emanating from her head. Other than not being an obvious bundle of neuroses, she is very much the way you might expect: wry, ruminative, able to take the smallest thing and find what is funny about it.

xhd