Episode 486: Cartooning is the Children’s Table of Art, says Roz Chast

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“You get rejected, and it’s like, well, fuck you. Who cares?” — Roz Chast, cartoonist for The New Yorker

Is it happening again? Did we do it? Another podcast? Podcasts are dead, man.

So today we have Roz Chast. You know Roz Chast, and if you don’t, quite frankly I hope we never meet. She’s a long time cartoonist for The New Yorker whose work is kinda of panicky and bleak and goofy and … heightened … and wicked smaht. She’s the author of Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?, Going into Town, and What I Hate from A to Z and what brought Roz to the podcast is a two 1,000-piece puzzles and a 2026 wall calendar now out by Workman Publishing. Really cool, and you can find those at hachettebookgroup.com.

Cool stuff.

Roz was, of course, a joy to speak with. I watched several interviews with her in preparation for this and I reached out to Dana Jeri Maier for questions because Dana loves Roz, and is a working cartoonist, so it seemed like a good shoulder to tap.

Roz is a true artist. She paints these pysanka eggs, which are dyed eggs with cool paintings on them. She’s into block printing now and she does some rug weaving things, too. I’m sure there’s a formal term for it. She was inducted into the Society of Illustrators Hall of Fame in 2019. She won the National Book Critics’ Circle award for Autobiography in 2014, and also was a National Book Award finalist for Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? Her work routinely appears in The New Yorker and in this episode we talk about:

The ricketyness of a freelance career
How being an outsider made her a better cartoonist
How cartooning is like being at the children’s table of art
Aging parents
And her experience on The Simpsons.

Lots of rich stuff here that I hope you enjoy. I know I did.

CNFin’ Snippets

“I really had no idea what people talked about, how to talk to people like, people my own age.”

“I have noticed now that I’ve done three books that each one is different. I’ve learned how to break it down, how to do this. And now I can go to the second book, and it’s easier.”

“I have to feel my way through it and there’s a lot of false starts, a lot of stuff goes in the garbage. And, you know, eventually, hopefully it hangs together, and you have a book.”

“You have to do a lot of different things to sort of patch it together. And, you know, be prepared for — what do they say? — hope for the best and expect the worst. You know, most people I know who do this, everybody I know who is an illustrator or cartoonist, they do it because they really love to do it.”

“Oh, the whole thing is just one panic after another. I wouldn’t say you get accustomed to it, but what it comes down to, again, is that I would rather do it than not do it, and that is really the whole metric of this. But, yeah, it sucks.”

“I really love this medium. I think cartooning is an incredible medium. There aren’t a lot of rules. You can, if you can, really make it up. You can make it suit you.”

Roz’s Rec

The movie Barry Lyndon

Parting Shot: Oh, yes, you do need to sell your book

So I was on this panel for Hippocamp. The featured reader. I was under the impression that I was part of the panel discussion that involved, primarily, debut authors. There was some miscommunication with the moderator. They emailed asking to provide some talking points to contribute to the conversation, but I was never asked anything of worth. I was asked about photos and how the title of my book came to be as time was running out. Only after did I realize I was, apparently, only there to read. Again, a communication error.

I bring this up because someone on the panel said their job wasn’t to sell their book, it was to write it. I think I may have put my Zoom hand up at this and was ignored …

This is all well and good and maybe in a perfect world your only job is to write and let other people sell. But make NO fucking mistake. Your No. 1 job is to the write the book, but jobs 2-99 are to sell the fucking thing. It is your job to take this thing you planted, nurtured, fertilized, pruned, and harvested and bring it to market, to celebrate it. Because if you don’t, I’m here to tell you that nobody will. If you think your publisher is coming to save the day, they are not. Oh, you have a Big-5 deal so you’re all set? 100% false. You will get a fancy press release on publisher stationery but if you expect them to bend over backwards and sell for you, nothing will happen.

Now, if you’re OK just writing books that get no attention and that’s your jam, then fine, definitely don’t sell. But let’s not kid ourselves, every single person who writes books cares about selling the most possible copies to the most amount of people. If you say otherwise, you are lying.

So when I hear someone, a debut author speaking to aspiring authors, saying it’s not their job to sell, that is malpractice. There is a LOT of unpaid work around the work we have to do. I’m not saying you have to live on social media. I’m telling you right now please do not live on social media! That’s a way of seeming like you’re working. But real work is writing columns and essays and newsletters and appearing on podcast after podcast, of celebrating other people’s work, of leaving 5-star reviews on Amazon and Goodreads for your peers whether you loved their book or not.

It’s also a way of passing the blame if it doesn’t do as well as you’d hoped. You can point to your PR team, or your publisher, or you favorite bookstore and say they didn’t do their job. It’s a way of not taking accountability for the success or failure of your book. If The Front Runner doesn’t sell — and it isn’t — that’s my fault.

In a perfect world, we get to publish our books and let someone else broadcast it. But that hasn’t been the case for what, 15 years, maybe more?

So if someone tries to tell you that as the writer it’s not your job to sell your book, smile and nod at some of the worst advice you just heard.