When Roz Chast’s daughter was about to leave the bucolic Connecticut suburb where she was raised to attend college in New York City, she asked her mother: “What’s a block?” The New Yorker cartoonist and author of the acclaimed and multiple award–winning book Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? answered that question, and more, in a 16-page guide to New York, chock-full of essential information delivered with her signature wit. Four years later, the well-worn booklet was returned to Mom, and Chast’s newest book, Going into Town: A Love Letter to New York (Bloomsbury, Oct.), was born.
“A lot of guidebooks show you places to go and things to see,” says Chast, “but they don’t tell you basic architecture about the city.” Knowing a handful of important basics such as Fifth Avenue divides the East Side from the West Side, and that a “cross street” is simply the number (or name) of the street that intersects the avenue you’re on, can make the city much less intimidating to a newcomer, she adds.
Born and raised in Brooklyn and a resident of the Upper West Side before departing to the country to accommodate her growing family, Chast still easily gets lost in her native city because, she says, “I have no sense of direction. Whatever a sense of direction is, I have the opposite.” Thus, she proclaims, “I love the grid,” referring to most of Manhattan above 14th Street that is neatly laid out in numbered streets and avenues. Within that zone, “I don’t usually go more than a block before I know I’ve gone wrong,” she says, “but off the grid—I could wind up in Albany. The only thing that would stop me is the river.”
Chast isn’t new to the book form per se—she has had several collections of her cartoons published— but Going into Town is only her sophomore adventure in the narrative graphic form. “The main difference is that the collections are comprised of separate little entities,” she says, while a book such as this demands an arc, “a story that ties together and not in an arbitrary way.”
Like many who put pen to paper, Chast starts and abandons her work over and over again. “Ninety percent of my cartoons get thrown away,” she says without exaggeration, but notes that there’s far less time invested in a cartoon than a book. “I can’t think of a cartoon that I worked on for six months and then had to throw it all in the garbage.” However, she is undaunted by the process; she’s already at work on her next book, a guide to Brooklyn.
Today, 1:30–2:30 p.m. Roz Chast will sign a limited-run poster from Going into Town in the Bloomsbury booth (3003).
