The Big Read 2024 project inspired by “Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant” by Roz Chast is a generational community recipe book and potluck book group honoring our parents, their parents and generations to come by creating an indelible story of family – both personal and universal – through the foods, traditions and stories that make each family unique.

Through a book circle and recipe exchange and discussion, participants in the project will have their family recipes and anecdotes gathered, illustrated and bound in an old-fashioned spiral cookbook to create a community offering that is a celebration and exploration of how Food is Family. Friends, neighbors and people new to the Center for the Arts Eagle Rock and DC community will gather for a potluck featuring the illustrated tamily recipes from the project cookbook, to celebrate our families and each other. Using the graphic novel as a springboard to explore what is remembered and what remains as our parents age and we along with them – and the heartbreak, joy I and reckoning that this brings – through food we find a shared language and experience that crosses generations, identities and cultures and binds us together through time, memory and taste.

Book club/recipe circles happening in March/April of 2024 with the culminating potluck and cookbook launch in May 2024.