“I didn’t grow up with advent calendars,” the cartoonist Roz Chast says, about “Cruellest Month,” her depiction of what we can expect, as the New Year begins. “There are none for Hanukkah. What would that show, even? . . . A tube of toothpaste?”
“I wanted to show just the horribleness of January.” Chast says. “Winter is really here, no vestige of fall. Four-thirty rolls around and it’s getting dark, and I’m thinking, Do I need anything? But why bother? Why ask for trouble? There isn’t much motivation to go outside. It’s ‘Why don’t I just open a can of tuna?’ month.”
