Nationally known New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast comes to Chimacum on Oct. 7 as the 2014 Sally Huntingford lecturer.

Chast’s humor lasers in on the quirks of daily life. In her lecture, she shows her cartoons and talks about her work and how it comes about.

“Hopefully, we’ll have lots of laughs. I’m looking forward to it,” said Chast.

“I think it’s going to be a really good time for the community, and a great opportunity for the community to get together and laugh,” said Meredith Wagner, director of the Jefferson County Library.

Chast’s sweetly domestic cartoons are grounded in the familiar, but take the everyday in surprising directions. There are greeting cards for ailing appliances; cautionary advice gone wrong; niche magazines for the neurotic, guilty, hapless or anxious; and much more.

Chast has been a regular contributor to the New Yorker magazine since 1978, when she first submitted her work as a recent art school graduate.

She grew up in Brooklyn, New York, the only child of teacher parents, doodled her way through school and enrolled in the Rhode Island School of Design at age 16. Majoring in graphic arts and painting, she emerged as a cartoonist.

She has been submitting six or seven cartoons weekly to the New Yorker since that first submission, and has been regularly published over the past 30-plus years, including covers and special pages.

“I never thought I would wind up at the New Yorker,” said Chast, one of about 40 staff cartoonists. The magazine uses 15-18 cartoons per issue.

“There’s a lot of rejection in this business. I’m incredibly fortunate. I can make a living doing what I like,” she said. “It still seems amazing to me. I don’t know too many secure cartoonists.”

Chast also is an illustrator and author. Her work includes “Theories of Everything: Selected, Collected, Health-Inspected Cartoons by Roz Chast, 1978-2006,” “Unscientific Americans,” “Parallel Universes,” “Mondo Boxo,” “The Four Elements,” “Proof of Life on Earth,” “Childproof,” “The Party After You Left” and “What I Hate: From A to Z.”

In addition to cartoon collections, she has written a pair of children’s books, “Too Busy Marco” and ”Marco Goes to School,” with one of her parrots as the main character.

She cowrote an alphabet book with comedian Steve Martin, “The Alphabet from A to Y with Bonus Letter Z,” an updated and quirky take on the usual alphabet letter pages.

Her newest children’s book, “Around the Clock,” is set to be published in January 2015.

Her latest book, “Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? A Memoir,” is very different. A surprisingly personal memoir relating her experiences dealing with her aging parents’ decline and deaths, made more intense by being an only child, is 228 pages of handwritten text, cartoons and photographs.

“I felt my parents were extremely interesting people. Like many people, I had sort of a complicated relationship with and conflicted feelings about them. I wanted to remember them, their voices, the way they talked, what they looked like,” said Chast. “I wrote it down because there are things that sort of disappear.”

The book has been longlisted for the National Book Foundation nonfiction award, the first time ever that a cartoonist has been considered for the award.

“This particular topic is pretty universal,” said Chast. “As far as I know, we’re all going to die.”

Chast manages to maintain her sense of humor through the difficult situations as she encounters them.

This is Chast’s first visit to Jefferson County. The free lecture takes place at 6:30 p.m. on Tuesday, Oct. 7 in the Chimacum High School Auditorium, 91 West Valley Road, Chimacum. Seating is limited. Doors open at 5:30 p.m.