Age troubles, emotional labor, and roz chast’s can’t we talk about something more pleasant?

In the article "Age Troubles, Emotional Labor, and Roz Chast’s Can’t We Talk about Something More Pleasant?," Shu-li Chang examines the medium—comics—Roz Chast uses to give expressions to the emotional labor involved in caregiving. The first section reads closely the Introduction of Chast’s memoir to set the stage for a critical engagement with Chast’s innovative use of comics to critique the discourse of positive aging. The next section examines the double movement of the emotional labor of caregiving: what moves the caregiving subject and how she is moved into thought. The article concludes by proposing, in the final section, an affective mode of reading that hopefully can do justice to Chast’s use of multi-medium techniques to lay bare those moments in the caregiving experience so invested with affective forces that the caregiving subject is moved, as if by shock, to resist interpretative or affective closure of any kind.