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Cheerful Money: Me, My Family, and the Last Days of Wasp Splendor
Tad Friend's family is nothing if not illustrious: his father was president of Swarthmore College, and at Smith his mother came in second in a poetry contest judged by W.H. Auden--to Sylvia Plath. For centuries, Wasps like his ancestors dominated American life. But then, in the '60s, their fortunes began to fall. As a young man, Tad noticed that his family tree, for all its glories, was full of alcoholics, depressives, and reckless eccentrics. Yet his identity had already been shaped by the family's age-old traditions and expectations. Part memoir, part family history, and part cultural study of the long swoon of the American Wasp, Cheerful Money is a captivating examination of a cultural crack-up and a man trying to escape its wreckage.
368 pages, Hardcover
First published September 2, 2009
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770 people want to read
About the author
Tad Friend
5 books37 followersTad Friend has been a staff writer at "The New Yorker" since 1998. His memoir "Cheerful Money" was chosen as one of the year's best books by "The Washington Post," "The Chicago Tribune," The San Francisco Chronicle," and NPR. His new book about his search for his father, "In the Early Times," comes out in May of 2022.. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife, Amanda Hesser--the founder of Food 52--and their fifteen-year-old twins.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 150 reviews
November 24, 2010
This book was alternately entertaining and bewildering. The author is a WASP, and the book is about how the WASPs are a dying breed. (No, this is not the same thing as when the bees died because of cell phones.)
It truly takes a WASP to believe that WASPS are a dying breed. (The author thinks the new-economy-internet-types are the new power players in the country.) Take a look around your company's board of directors and tally up how many of them are WASPS. Take a quick look at Congress and see how many are WASPs. (Speaking of WASP politicians, Friend points out something that made me laugh quite hard: Bill Clinton is a white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant, but he'll never be a WASP, because poor people from Arkansas can never be WASPs. George Bush, on the other hand, is a WASP through and through. That whole shtick about bein' a brush-clearin' cowboy down on the ranch was just PR to get people to see past the old money, the Yale education, and the New England background.)
The fact that Friend is delusional about WASPs fading away is tempered by the fact that he is also incredibly self-aware and self-deprecating. He knows that he sounds like a rich spoiled brat, and he's okay with it, and he points it out, and it's kind of funny. He spent his inheritance almost entirely on therapy and analysis. How perfectly WASPy is that?
It truly takes a WASP to believe that WASPS are a dying breed. (The author thinks the new-economy-internet-types are the new power players in the country.) Take a look around your company's board of directors and tally up how many of them are WASPS. Take a quick look at Congress and see how many are WASPs. (Speaking of WASP politicians, Friend points out something that made me laugh quite hard: Bill Clinton is a white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant, but he'll never be a WASP, because poor people from Arkansas can never be WASPs. George Bush, on the other hand, is a WASP through and through. That whole shtick about bein' a brush-clearin' cowboy down on the ranch was just PR to get people to see past the old money, the Yale education, and the New England background.)
The fact that Friend is delusional about WASPs fading away is tempered by the fact that he is also incredibly self-aware and self-deprecating. He knows that he sounds like a rich spoiled brat, and he's okay with it, and he points it out, and it's kind of funny. He spent his inheritance almost entirely on therapy and analysis. How perfectly WASPy is that?
December 18, 2010
It's interesting that so many of the goodreads reviews about Cheerful Money are ambivalent. I liked so much of this book, and then I thought "Big whoop" about a lot of it. A lot of what Friend characterizes as "Wasp" is just a sad family dynamic. But also clearly a loving family as well. In short, families that are families. I read it because I have a big girlcrush on Amanda Hesser, the NY Times food writer and founder of Food 52 web community, and Tad Friend's wife. I'm glad that I did read it because it explained to me exactly why I hated going to college in Massachusetts so much. When I got to Smith I just couldn't understand the culture and why traditions there mattered to people and how they knew what to do. Reading this book made me understand and then ask myself, "Who cares?"
It's beautifully written, and the structure of the narrative is fluid. Friend's own story is interwoven, not always chronologically, with his family's and the chapters are grouped around a name or phrase that takes on resonance as the chapter progresses. I loved the meandering pace, and there is a great payback at the end of the book when he marries Amanda H. I'm glad he wrote the book, I'm glad that I don't have anything to do with his world, and I am so thankful to have been raised in California.
It's beautifully written, and the structure of the narrative is fluid. Friend's own story is interwoven, not always chronologically, with his family's and the chapters are grouped around a name or phrase that takes on resonance as the chapter progresses. I loved the meandering pace, and there is a great payback at the end of the book when he marries Amanda H. I'm glad he wrote the book, I'm glad that I don't have anything to do with his world, and I am so thankful to have been raised in California.
October 17, 2009
This review originally appeared on the literary website, The Second Pass:
It would be possible to make three good, small books of Cheerful Money. Not that I’m suggesting anyone chop it up with a kitchen knife, as Janet Malcolm did to The Making of Americans by Gertrude Stein. I’d just like to imagine the book, for a moment, in three bindings rather than one, with the history of Tad Friend’s family, Friend’s reading of WASP culture, and his memoir of his own life — the three stories mixed together in Cheerful Money — each standing on its own.
The best of these mini-books would concern the symbols of WASPdom. It would include Friend’s description of the “WASP fridge,” its “out-of-season grapes, seltzer, and vodka . . . both 1 and 2 percent milk, moldy cheese, expired yogurt, and separated sour cream” and, sitting atop, “Pepperidge Farm Milanos, Fig Newtons, or Saltines — some chewy or salty or otherwise challenging snack.”
WASPs love “getting dirty . . . in a game of touch football,” Friend explains, mud being their “only sanctioned form of filth.” They name their dogs after liquor — Bourbon, Asti, Cloey (for Clos du Boi), and Casey (for “case of beer”) are the names of some of the dogs owned by Sally, a classmate of Friend’s at boarding school. They “cream off family names as given names” (Mortimer, Courtlandt, and Whitney being examples of such “creamed” first names). And they hang onto everything they’ve ever owned: “etched-crystal wineglasses” and “pedestaled fruit plates” and “egg spoons of translucent horn” are some things they may expect to inherit.
These choice observations, and many more like them, if collected in a small volume, would remind some readers of the best-selling Official Preppy Handbook, though without that book’s direct satire or — as Preppies can be made but WASPs are born — potential sales. (Though it was a satire, many people read the Handbook as a style manual, including Friend himself, as he confesses here.)
WASPs are “circumscribed less by skin tone and religion” than by a “cast of mind.” They’re born into families that harbor firmly fixed views, carried over the generations, about minor matters. Friend recalls a running dispute between his great uncle, Wilson Pierson, who descends from a line that pronounces tomato “tomayto,” and his mother, Elizabeth, whose own mother was in the “staunchly Anglophile ‘tomahto’ camp.” When she would ask Wilson for a “tomahto,” Wilson would snap, “Would you like some potahtoes with that?” The WASP mind, Friend explains, is “excessively tuned to such questions as how you say tomato.”
Another marker, of course, is a generations-long history of wealth. Friend’s own richest relative, his great great grandfather, Big Jim Friend, left his heirs $15,000,000, the equivalent of $345,000,000 today, though most of that money was lost — much of it squandered over many years maintaining a three-house compound with eighteen servants on Pittsburgh’s Squirrel Hill, and some of it drained by the Depression. Friend doesn’t fix on an amount of money that separates a WASP from an ordinary Anglo, but any reader will quickly grasp how very few families legitimately deserve the appellation. Friend’s maternal great grandfather, Charles Pierson, was a Yale valedictorian and Manhattan corporate lawyer, and it was the Pierson family summer house, an eight-bedroom mansion on Georgica Pond in Long Island, where the “tomahto” spats unfolded. WASPs are people whose quibbles about language have an ocean view.
Friend’s portraits of men such as Jim Friend and Charles Pierson, which account for more pages than either of the other two strands of the book, tell in their aggregate a story of decline. Theodore Wood Friend, Big Jim’s son, was an incompetent bank president who had “skinny legs and a care-worn appearance that made him look old when he wasn’t, and ancient when he was.” His son (the author’s grandfather), Ted Friend, talked up dive bomb stocks — Nerlip Mines, Red Rock Cola, and laughably, Hygienic Telephone — before his brokerage firm fired him. Before he was fifty, he’d “retired to playing backgammon” at the Pittsburgh club.
Tad’s father, Dorie Friend, brought to his marriage, in 1960, a relative pittance: less than $50,000. That was still a lot of money, but it went fast. Friend remembers wondering why he could “see the road through the rusted floor” of the family station wagon.
WASP fortunes began to turn in 1965, three years after Friend was born. That was the year Yale’s new admissions director, R. Inslee “Inky” Clark, dramatically reduced the allotment of spots for alumni offspring to 12 percent from 20; the year it first became clear that “the WASP elite running the war” in Vietnam “hadn’t a clue.” It was also the year Lyndon Johnson mandated affirmative action for government employees and, perhaps of most significant symbolism, “the country’s most famous and exclusive clubs stopped updating their look and feel.” Today, as in 1965:
If you go to these clubs for dinner on a Saturday night, you get Scotch-plaid-upholstered furniture in the vintage cherry or English tavern finish; accordion-folded napkins in water glasses and sourdough rolls on the bread plates. . . . And, for company, an elderly gent in the corner in a striped three-piece suit.
The gradual erosion of the fortunes of the Friend family, then, was the manifestation of a broader trend. The Friends are not the only WASP family whose stories of fortunes triumphantly amassed — which, in the case of Big Jim, involved evicting striking Pressed Steel Car Company workers from their homes and a clash between those workers and his “Coal and Iron Police” that killed 12 people — are all but eclipsed by stories of gradually (then suddenly) losing them.
There are dozens of these family portraits, more than any reader will want to manage. Because the mini-biographies don’t follow a chronological order, and accounts of the different branches of Friend’s family are interweaved, the names and generations begin to blur. And few of the profiles are long enough to probe deeper mysteries of character.
But Friend’s expert descriptions make up for the jumble, particularly those of relatives who have spent their lives chafing against expectations. His cousin Norah became pregnant at age 19 while a second-year student at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. She put the baby up for adoption and later had two abortions. In Santa Fe, she used her father’s money to build “the Flintstone House,” an “ordinary bungalow” that she “wrapped in ten thousand pounds of polyurethane foam.” At age 52, she resettled on Pierson family territory, living year-round in an artist’s studio across from the family’s Long Island summer house, the upkeep of which she oversaw. Friend recalls her rolling “her own blunts on the porch, pot smoke wreathing her gray topknot.” Norah’s sister changed her name — first calling herself “Reverend Trish,” then Molly Morgan Miller — and never returned to the fold.
As for the impression Tad Friend provides of Theodore Porter Friend — or, himself — it includes an affecting remembrance of his freshman advisor at Harvard, an orotund epicure who shepherded him into the Lampoon; too much about his ten-year on-again, off-again affair with an Italian heiress; and nothing at all about his intellectual formation — not a single recollection of an ecstatic experience with a book, and not one anecdote related to his long tenure at The New Yorker, where he is a staff writer.
Friend might make the case that his undergraduate education and his job aren’t part of this particular story, but I caught myself using his own cultural theories as a lens for understanding the book’s omissions, its flaws. “Visible striving or seriousness of purpose is unWASP because it suggests that you aren’t yet at — haven’t always been at — the top,” he writes. WASPs are, he reports, masters of “the trick of effortlessness . . . the loosely knotted tie and the feet on the sill.” So, Harvard and The New Yorker: yes, they happened, but what’s the big deal?
WASPs are “circumspect,” according to Friend, but he isn’t so circumspect as to keep from exposing himself and his family in this memoir, or of writing about his mother, an emotionally distant woman who imposed upon her children afternoon naps until they were “twelve, thirteen, amazingly old” to keep her house “free of traffic.” She is the dominant — but also most elusive — figure in this story, and her death in 2003 inspired Friend to write the book.
Friend remembers “building the internal WASP rheostat, the dimmer switch on desires” as a child; and of “long[ing:]” as an adult for his psychoanalyst to “reach inside” and “rip” it out, which he compares to the moment in the Chronicles of Narnia in which Aslan “gouges off” Eustace’s “scaly exoskeleton.” One of the pleasures of this book is watching Friend struggle to do this — and come pretty close to succeeding.
It would be possible to make three good, small books of Cheerful Money. Not that I’m suggesting anyone chop it up with a kitchen knife, as Janet Malcolm did to The Making of Americans by Gertrude Stein. I’d just like to imagine the book, for a moment, in three bindings rather than one, with the history of Tad Friend’s family, Friend’s reading of WASP culture, and his memoir of his own life — the three stories mixed together in Cheerful Money — each standing on its own.
The best of these mini-books would concern the symbols of WASPdom. It would include Friend’s description of the “WASP fridge,” its “out-of-season grapes, seltzer, and vodka . . . both 1 and 2 percent milk, moldy cheese, expired yogurt, and separated sour cream” and, sitting atop, “Pepperidge Farm Milanos, Fig Newtons, or Saltines — some chewy or salty or otherwise challenging snack.”
WASPs love “getting dirty . . . in a game of touch football,” Friend explains, mud being their “only sanctioned form of filth.” They name their dogs after liquor — Bourbon, Asti, Cloey (for Clos du Boi), and Casey (for “case of beer”) are the names of some of the dogs owned by Sally, a classmate of Friend’s at boarding school. They “cream off family names as given names” (Mortimer, Courtlandt, and Whitney being examples of such “creamed” first names). And they hang onto everything they’ve ever owned: “etched-crystal wineglasses” and “pedestaled fruit plates” and “egg spoons of translucent horn” are some things they may expect to inherit.
These choice observations, and many more like them, if collected in a small volume, would remind some readers of the best-selling Official Preppy Handbook, though without that book’s direct satire or — as Preppies can be made but WASPs are born — potential sales. (Though it was a satire, many people read the Handbook as a style manual, including Friend himself, as he confesses here.)
WASPs are “circumscribed less by skin tone and religion” than by a “cast of mind.” They’re born into families that harbor firmly fixed views, carried over the generations, about minor matters. Friend recalls a running dispute between his great uncle, Wilson Pierson, who descends from a line that pronounces tomato “tomayto,” and his mother, Elizabeth, whose own mother was in the “staunchly Anglophile ‘tomahto’ camp.” When she would ask Wilson for a “tomahto,” Wilson would snap, “Would you like some potahtoes with that?” The WASP mind, Friend explains, is “excessively tuned to such questions as how you say tomato.”
Another marker, of course, is a generations-long history of wealth. Friend’s own richest relative, his great great grandfather, Big Jim Friend, left his heirs $15,000,000, the equivalent of $345,000,000 today, though most of that money was lost — much of it squandered over many years maintaining a three-house compound with eighteen servants on Pittsburgh’s Squirrel Hill, and some of it drained by the Depression. Friend doesn’t fix on an amount of money that separates a WASP from an ordinary Anglo, but any reader will quickly grasp how very few families legitimately deserve the appellation. Friend’s maternal great grandfather, Charles Pierson, was a Yale valedictorian and Manhattan corporate lawyer, and it was the Pierson family summer house, an eight-bedroom mansion on Georgica Pond in Long Island, where the “tomahto” spats unfolded. WASPs are people whose quibbles about language have an ocean view.
Friend’s portraits of men such as Jim Friend and Charles Pierson, which account for more pages than either of the other two strands of the book, tell in their aggregate a story of decline. Theodore Wood Friend, Big Jim’s son, was an incompetent bank president who had “skinny legs and a care-worn appearance that made him look old when he wasn’t, and ancient when he was.” His son (the author’s grandfather), Ted Friend, talked up dive bomb stocks — Nerlip Mines, Red Rock Cola, and laughably, Hygienic Telephone — before his brokerage firm fired him. Before he was fifty, he’d “retired to playing backgammon” at the Pittsburgh club.
Tad’s father, Dorie Friend, brought to his marriage, in 1960, a relative pittance: less than $50,000. That was still a lot of money, but it went fast. Friend remembers wondering why he could “see the road through the rusted floor” of the family station wagon.
WASP fortunes began to turn in 1965, three years after Friend was born. That was the year Yale’s new admissions director, R. Inslee “Inky” Clark, dramatically reduced the allotment of spots for alumni offspring to 12 percent from 20; the year it first became clear that “the WASP elite running the war” in Vietnam “hadn’t a clue.” It was also the year Lyndon Johnson mandated affirmative action for government employees and, perhaps of most significant symbolism, “the country’s most famous and exclusive clubs stopped updating their look and feel.” Today, as in 1965:
If you go to these clubs for dinner on a Saturday night, you get Scotch-plaid-upholstered furniture in the vintage cherry or English tavern finish; accordion-folded napkins in water glasses and sourdough rolls on the bread plates. . . . And, for company, an elderly gent in the corner in a striped three-piece suit.
The gradual erosion of the fortunes of the Friend family, then, was the manifestation of a broader trend. The Friends are not the only WASP family whose stories of fortunes triumphantly amassed — which, in the case of Big Jim, involved evicting striking Pressed Steel Car Company workers from their homes and a clash between those workers and his “Coal and Iron Police” that killed 12 people — are all but eclipsed by stories of gradually (then suddenly) losing them.
There are dozens of these family portraits, more than any reader will want to manage. Because the mini-biographies don’t follow a chronological order, and accounts of the different branches of Friend’s family are interweaved, the names and generations begin to blur. And few of the profiles are long enough to probe deeper mysteries of character.
But Friend’s expert descriptions make up for the jumble, particularly those of relatives who have spent their lives chafing against expectations. His cousin Norah became pregnant at age 19 while a second-year student at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. She put the baby up for adoption and later had two abortions. In Santa Fe, she used her father’s money to build “the Flintstone House,” an “ordinary bungalow” that she “wrapped in ten thousand pounds of polyurethane foam.” At age 52, she resettled on Pierson family territory, living year-round in an artist’s studio across from the family’s Long Island summer house, the upkeep of which she oversaw. Friend recalls her rolling “her own blunts on the porch, pot smoke wreathing her gray topknot.” Norah’s sister changed her name — first calling herself “Reverend Trish,” then Molly Morgan Miller — and never returned to the fold.
As for the impression Tad Friend provides of Theodore Porter Friend — or, himself — it includes an affecting remembrance of his freshman advisor at Harvard, an orotund epicure who shepherded him into the Lampoon; too much about his ten-year on-again, off-again affair with an Italian heiress; and nothing at all about his intellectual formation — not a single recollection of an ecstatic experience with a book, and not one anecdote related to his long tenure at The New Yorker, where he is a staff writer.
Friend might make the case that his undergraduate education and his job aren’t part of this particular story, but I caught myself using his own cultural theories as a lens for understanding the book’s omissions, its flaws. “Visible striving or seriousness of purpose is unWASP because it suggests that you aren’t yet at — haven’t always been at — the top,” he writes. WASPs are, he reports, masters of “the trick of effortlessness . . . the loosely knotted tie and the feet on the sill.” So, Harvard and The New Yorker: yes, they happened, but what’s the big deal?
WASPs are “circumspect,” according to Friend, but he isn’t so circumspect as to keep from exposing himself and his family in this memoir, or of writing about his mother, an emotionally distant woman who imposed upon her children afternoon naps until they were “twelve, thirteen, amazingly old” to keep her house “free of traffic.” She is the dominant — but also most elusive — figure in this story, and her death in 2003 inspired Friend to write the book.
Friend remembers “building the internal WASP rheostat, the dimmer switch on desires” as a child; and of “long[ing:]” as an adult for his psychoanalyst to “reach inside” and “rip” it out, which he compares to the moment in the Chronicles of Narnia in which Aslan “gouges off” Eustace’s “scaly exoskeleton.” One of the pleasures of this book is watching Friend struggle to do this — and come pretty close to succeeding.
June 17, 2012
A very funny, and engrossing field guide to Eastern WASP culture. It explains a lot of what I saw and failed to understand in several decades of marriage within that world...but certainly not born to it. It is neurotic, historical, idiosyncratic, and revealing. Treated as a Lonely Planet guide, used after you have visited the country, it is also useful...if, perhaps, slightly out of date.
Friend's tone feels like those late night bullshit sessions in college...the ones where you get down to it, but with humor and exhausted revelation. I liked it a lot. I guess a good test of how funny it is was reading it in a few restaurants and coffee shops, and unexpectedly burst into laughter enough times....and with enough velocity...to draw stares from other patrons. There is insight here, and the kind of gentle wit, easy scholarship, arrogance, modesty, and absolute strangeness that is the best of the old WASP world.
I was not compelled to finish this book in one or two sittings as I usually do, but to pick it up and put it down, and pick it up again...as a series of visits with a good friend...no pun intended.
Friend's tone feels like those late night bullshit sessions in college...the ones where you get down to it, but with humor and exhausted revelation. I liked it a lot. I guess a good test of how funny it is was reading it in a few restaurants and coffee shops, and unexpectedly burst into laughter enough times....and with enough velocity...to draw stares from other patrons. There is insight here, and the kind of gentle wit, easy scholarship, arrogance, modesty, and absolute strangeness that is the best of the old WASP world.
I was not compelled to finish this book in one or two sittings as I usually do, but to pick it up and put it down, and pick it up again...as a series of visits with a good friend...no pun intended.
February 1, 2010
This is an incredibly difficult book to rate as it is written well (the author doesn't write for The New Yorker for no reason), but the subject itself was at times tedious.
Tad Friend is a self-proclaimed WASP from a long lineage of WASPs, and is at once both disturbed by and proud of it. His memoir discusses what it means to be a WASP (not to be confused with a "prep" which is detailed in one of the chapters), and the first half of the book that investigates this lifestyle is fairly interesting as it always is to see how other folks live. But once Friend began delving into his place in the family, his views on his family, his own beliefs (which don't vary that much from his family, despite what he seems to want to portray), etc. my interest waned. After a while it felt like he was that person at the office who always complains about the amount of work he/she has to do, but as soon as the boss takes away said amount of work, he/she takes it all very personally, he/she didn't really want it to go away for all of his/her bitching. Friend does that here in some ways in that he almost turns his nose up at the lifestyle of his family, and complains about the lack of love and other necessities, but then turns around and embraces those exact things.
I guess that's probably his point. We are what we know, after all.
Moving beyond that, the second half of the book felt like a vehicle for the psychoanalysis he eventually stopped participating in, which he describes in some detail. The book is his way of continuing his investigation into his own behaviors, though I'm not sure in the end he made any true headway. After all, he just wants to be loved, despite where he came from.
There were some nice shout-outs to Pittsburgh, particularly Squirrel Hill (the family compound originally was on Solway Street). It's a shame it no longer stands there; I would have liked to see it outside of the b/w photo in the insert.
What complicates the rating system for me is that it's all written well, which I can at least respect. His words smelled of all of the Henry James, Edith Wharton, Scott Fitzgerald high-society novels I've ever read, and Friend makes sure to acknowledge that throughout his memoir. Those authors made money on these situations because they were real, which Friend illustrates wonderfully here, whether I approve of the lifestyle or even can fully comprehend it. No family is without flaws, certainly, and Friend gave me a fine serving of food-for-thought. I just wish it hadn't been quite so woe-is-me-aren't-we-awesome.
Tad Friend is a self-proclaimed WASP from a long lineage of WASPs, and is at once both disturbed by and proud of it. His memoir discusses what it means to be a WASP (not to be confused with a "prep" which is detailed in one of the chapters), and the first half of the book that investigates this lifestyle is fairly interesting as it always is to see how other folks live. But once Friend began delving into his place in the family, his views on his family, his own beliefs (which don't vary that much from his family, despite what he seems to want to portray), etc. my interest waned. After a while it felt like he was that person at the office who always complains about the amount of work he/she has to do, but as soon as the boss takes away said amount of work, he/she takes it all very personally, he/she didn't really want it to go away for all of his/her bitching. Friend does that here in some ways in that he almost turns his nose up at the lifestyle of his family, and complains about the lack of love and other necessities, but then turns around and embraces those exact things.
I guess that's probably his point. We are what we know, after all.
Moving beyond that, the second half of the book felt like a vehicle for the psychoanalysis he eventually stopped participating in, which he describes in some detail. The book is his way of continuing his investigation into his own behaviors, though I'm not sure in the end he made any true headway. After all, he just wants to be loved, despite where he came from.
There were some nice shout-outs to Pittsburgh, particularly Squirrel Hill (the family compound originally was on Solway Street). It's a shame it no longer stands there; I would have liked to see it outside of the b/w photo in the insert.
What complicates the rating system for me is that it's all written well, which I can at least respect. His words smelled of all of the Henry James, Edith Wharton, Scott Fitzgerald high-society novels I've ever read, and Friend makes sure to acknowledge that throughout his memoir. Those authors made money on these situations because they were real, which Friend illustrates wonderfully here, whether I approve of the lifestyle or even can fully comprehend it. No family is without flaws, certainly, and Friend gave me a fine serving of food-for-thought. I just wish it hadn't been quite so woe-is-me-aren't-we-awesome.
February 13, 2010
This book is really hard for me to rate. I'm afraid I can't agree with many of the illustrious blurbs on the back cover--I didn't find it stunning or especially moving, and I didn't find it funny, humorous OR hilarious, as it was variously called. Graydon Carter said it "goes down like a bittersweet late-summer cocktail made with a jigger of Cheever and a splash of Wodehouse." Now this is an unbearably awesome phrase, and I am pining to drink...I mean, read such a book; I just didn't find it here. And yet I must point out, this is truly wonderfully, beautifully written. Friend is a really, really good writer, and this is a lovely family memoir. It just wasn't what I wanted it to be, which really isn't the book's fault. I was hoping for more of a cultural and historical examination of Wasp culture, through the prism of this author's family. Friend has written a memoir of his esteemed, fucked-up, mildly interesting family, who happen to be Wasps. I don't tend to like memoirs in the bitter, dysfunctional, woe-is-me-my-parents-screwed-me-up vein. And this guy spent most of his $160,000 inheritence on freaking therapy, so there's a bit of this there. For readers who are looking for a well-written family memoir, this would probably be a good choice. For a study of Wasp-dom, not so much.
February 10, 2010
sad to say, i didn't really "get" this book. mary karr (an author i like quite a bit) gave it a good blurb, but i apparently failed to see what she saw. it was not "side-splittingly" hilarious, & mary karr is no WASP, so supposedly you don't have to be one to understand the humor. maybe you have to live in new york? not sure.
this is basically just a family memoir. i can only assume it got published because friend writes for "the new yorker" & has plenty of publishing contacts, because i can't begin to imagine that any editor actually found the story interesting. it was nearly impossible to keep all the players straight (& even the provided family tree flummoxed me, with everyone getting divorced & marrying two & three times, with step-children aplenty--not that i'm judging). everyone is named after everyone else, & then has some cutesy nickname to boot. baffling. & i guess i also just wasn't interested enough to make the effort.
maybe someone could explain to me the point of this book? because i was expecting some kind of parable on WASp culture told through the prism of one multi-generation family, & i got the sense that that's exactly what friend was going for, & it really didn't come off at all.
this is basically just a family memoir. i can only assume it got published because friend writes for "the new yorker" & has plenty of publishing contacts, because i can't begin to imagine that any editor actually found the story interesting. it was nearly impossible to keep all the players straight (& even the provided family tree flummoxed me, with everyone getting divorced & marrying two & three times, with step-children aplenty--not that i'm judging). everyone is named after everyone else, & then has some cutesy nickname to boot. baffling. & i guess i also just wasn't interested enough to make the effort.
maybe someone could explain to me the point of this book? because i was expecting some kind of parable on WASp culture told through the prism of one multi-generation family, & i got the sense that that's exactly what friend was going for, & it really didn't come off at all.
August 16, 2016
A warm, fuzzy and familiar sweater of a book. Friend's spiel is essentially that he comes from American nobility, a venerable WASP clan that primed him for greatness exactly at the moment that its empire was crumbling under the blows of meritocracy and transparency. (Crumbling, though even today one supposes, not completely crumbled.) But in practice this book is a regular family memoir, told with sensitivity, nostalgia and affection, though not bereft of criticism. Friend exemplifies the positive traits of his, uh, ethnicity? clan? cohort? - but is keenly aware of the negatives - scandals kept secret, bad marriages, repression, racism, alcoholism. Meandering through the story of his privileged upbringing, stopping to examine childhood homes, back-stories of minor relatives, fizzled relationships and lost years: in the hands of a lesser writer, this could become quite a drag. But Friend is a gifted writer, wielding his intelligence carefully, and writing with kindness, wit and an understated grace. So the story starts to feel almost like a lost memory, on a lawn by the beach, where the reader came of age, feeling the ocean swell and the sting of homesickness with each turn of the page.
June 16, 2017
Life's too short to read bad books... I really was excited to read this, but it was just a bunch of seemingly disconnected ramblings. I thought the topic could have been very interesting, but it just seemed like sort of self-important nonsensical stream of conscious.
February 21, 2011
I don't know why I finished this one. I picked it up because I always like Friend's pieces in The New Yorker. But this book was sort of boring and sort of enraging. Maybe I didn't relate because I'm not a Wasp and I come from definitely non-Waspy folks. But when Tad inherited $100,000 from his grandmother and decided it would be best used on further psycho-analysis I just wanted to punch him in the neck.
June 22, 2024
An entertaining book, but a confusing one. I realize the topic is “WASP culture,” but I wasn’t expecting SO MANY PEOPLE to share the same nickname. Lots of women named “Tim/Timmy.” Lots of Pierson/Piers as first names—and last names. I guess it comes with the territory, but deciphering which one was which kinda jammed up the narrative.
Unlike most memoirs, I learned very little about the author; he’s still as inscrutable after blowing his inheritance on psychoanalysis than he was as a prep school kid.
And when he talks about his family being “almost out of money,” I’m not sure what he means; when MY family was low on money, we shopped at stores with expired bread and unlabeled cans of food. Finding himself poorly-funded, the author goes to Portugal instead of taking a full European tour. Um, WHAT? There’s no irony or self-reflection in this matter, and coupled with the fact that he floats from high-end journalism position to high-end journalism position after having his pick of Ivy educations, I don’t think the author realizes that WASPish culture is not dying out and bowing to the new money, it’s actually digging in its heels and flourishing.
Still, pleasant and illuminating—-I finished with the “WASPs are alive and well and still committed to the enclave of superiority and oddly draconian New England tastes and comforts.
Unlike most memoirs, I learned very little about the author; he’s still as inscrutable after blowing his inheritance on psychoanalysis than he was as a prep school kid.
And when he talks about his family being “almost out of money,” I’m not sure what he means; when MY family was low on money, we shopped at stores with expired bread and unlabeled cans of food. Finding himself poorly-funded, the author goes to Portugal instead of taking a full European tour. Um, WHAT? There’s no irony or self-reflection in this matter, and coupled with the fact that he floats from high-end journalism position to high-end journalism position after having his pick of Ivy educations, I don’t think the author realizes that WASPish culture is not dying out and bowing to the new money, it’s actually digging in its heels and flourishing.
Still, pleasant and illuminating—-I finished with the “WASPs are alive and well and still committed to the enclave of superiority and oddly draconian New England tastes and comforts.
July 28, 2022
Very funny. So sad that the wealth/power/prominence of some families like these is diminishing. NOT!
August 9, 2022
I read about this 2009 memoir in the Boston Globe, which mentioned it favorably in comparison to the author's most recent memoir, so I sought it out. And read it. And was pretty underwhelmed. Yes, it's well-written, with insight and humor, but the story of a WASP family's fading wealth and stature just didn't grab me. Too bad, so sad was my general feeling – not that the author isn't analytical about and critical of WASP culture and elitism, but the myriad family members whose stories he tells aren't as much colorful as spoiled and awful; likewise, his self-deprecating accounts of his own trials, tribulations, and unsuccessful love life get old. I don't know, maybe I'm missing something, given that it was chosen a “Best Book” by many newspapers, but mostly I can't get too worked up about someone's privileged upbringing and forebears. Meh.
May 2, 2010
I can't decide what I think about this book, when I started it I almost quit, I found it maddening. I thought the writing was constipated, pretentious, self-important, snobbish. Maybe I am constitutionally not the right person to be reading this. I had thought it would be interesting to get an insider's view of the uppercrust. Sometimes I feel like it's all a bit of a stretch, though. Like it's his master's thesis, trying to prove that there is some kind of WASP way of being and he's going to pin it down for us..putting people and his life into a box. Sometimes I just don't buy it, people are just too complicated and messy. You can't make all of it add up nicely. But I have kept on with it and there are some genuinely funny moments and some insightful comments. He's all over the map though with the story. Bringing in relatives all the time, I can't keep ANYONE straight. Seems to be no strong narrative line, a jumble of anecdotes, quotes from his reading about WASPS. It's so offhand, his writing, though I do appreciate all the research and you can tell he's a thoughtful person and he's trying to create something of substance. Agghh. The book is full of contradictions for me. He wants to expose WASPs, but he also wants to honor his heritage...it's discombobulating. Sometimes he seems quite proud and very much a snob and a product of his upbringing. Other times, he seems to have the distance necessary to recognize some of the ridiculousness of the old rich. I guess he feels pretty conflicted, b/c I'm feeling completely confused.
Here are some funny parts:
"I think it is the most sad thing in the world, what has happened to the Rogers family. We have Kitty, who is locked up. We have May, taking care of an old companion. We have John, who shot himself. We have Freddy, who jumped out of a window. And we have Pen, who is very sad, and with nothing...I never should have married your father, unfortunately, but I did."
One character in the book can't commit to any of the men she dates, this is from a letter one of those men wrote to her after they broke up:
" It is a good thing that I remained firm in the face of all your urging and did not acquire a new toilet seat. Had I followed your advice I would now be reminded of you so many times a day; fulfilling the most natural functions would be associated with great sorrowful reminiscences."
An insightful comment:
"Mom was particularly suspicious of happiness, believing it not only unseemly to express it, but foredooming even to feel it, or at least to feel it without reservation."
About his grandpa who wrote a book titled Long Battle for an Idea:
"It was, perhaps, a depressive's way of making manifest all teh obstacles he had always had to face"
Okay, So I've finished and it just doesn't live up to its promise, sorry Tad Friend, better luck next time
Here are some funny parts:
"I think it is the most sad thing in the world, what has happened to the Rogers family. We have Kitty, who is locked up. We have May, taking care of an old companion. We have John, who shot himself. We have Freddy, who jumped out of a window. And we have Pen, who is very sad, and with nothing...I never should have married your father, unfortunately, but I did."
One character in the book can't commit to any of the men she dates, this is from a letter one of those men wrote to her after they broke up:
" It is a good thing that I remained firm in the face of all your urging and did not acquire a new toilet seat. Had I followed your advice I would now be reminded of you so many times a day; fulfilling the most natural functions would be associated with great sorrowful reminiscences."
An insightful comment:
"Mom was particularly suspicious of happiness, believing it not only unseemly to express it, but foredooming even to feel it, or at least to feel it without reservation."
About his grandpa who wrote a book titled Long Battle for an Idea:
"It was, perhaps, a depressive's way of making manifest all teh obstacles he had always had to face"
Okay, So I've finished and it just doesn't live up to its promise, sorry Tad Friend, better luck next time
May 18, 2010
PUNCTILIOUS POOP.
It was the clever title that roped me into reading this book. “…Last Days of Wasp Splendor,” had me hoping. Unfortunately, the title turned out to be the best part of this confusing and rather dull story.
Despite his enviable, world-class vocabulary and his obvious facility with words, Tad Friend’s pretentious memoir: ‘Cheerful Money: Me, My Family and the Last Days of Wasp Splendor’ falls short of being entertaining or interesting. Only Chapter Four: Sand, and its stories about, Norah, the oldest daughter of his mother’s uncle (all the relationships in this memoir were this confusing, or more so), coaxed me out of a second star. This memoir sailed right over my head.
Recommendation: Not likely.
A couple of interesting quotes:
“Fundamentalism is not merely a wave in religion worldwide: it is a tide.” –pg 31
“I felt guilty and spooked, brushed by the monkey’s paw.” –pg 215 (Even Google couldn’t help explain this interesting phrase: “brushed by the monkey’s paw.” Has anyone ever heard it before?)
“In 1648, the colony [Massachusetts:] established the death penalty for children over age sixteen who disobeyed their parents.” –pg 87 (Ya gotta love those folks in Salem. Maybe we can get this one passed as a constitutional amendment.)
[Nook eRead #15:] (Adobe Digital Edition (ePUB), 285 pages. On 21-day loan from the Los Angeles County Public Library)
It was the clever title that roped me into reading this book. “…Last Days of Wasp Splendor,” had me hoping. Unfortunately, the title turned out to be the best part of this confusing and rather dull story.
Despite his enviable, world-class vocabulary and his obvious facility with words, Tad Friend’s pretentious memoir: ‘Cheerful Money: Me, My Family and the Last Days of Wasp Splendor’ falls short of being entertaining or interesting. Only Chapter Four: Sand, and its stories about, Norah, the oldest daughter of his mother’s uncle (all the relationships in this memoir were this confusing, or more so), coaxed me out of a second star. This memoir sailed right over my head.
Recommendation: Not likely.
A couple of interesting quotes:
“Fundamentalism is not merely a wave in religion worldwide: it is a tide.” –pg 31
“I felt guilty and spooked, brushed by the monkey’s paw.” –pg 215 (Even Google couldn’t help explain this interesting phrase: “brushed by the monkey’s paw.” Has anyone ever heard it before?)
“In 1648, the colony [Massachusetts:] established the death penalty for children over age sixteen who disobeyed their parents.” –pg 87 (Ya gotta love those folks in Salem. Maybe we can get this one passed as a constitutional amendment.)
[Nook eRead #15:] (Adobe Digital Edition (ePUB), 285 pages. On 21-day loan from the Los Angeles County Public Library)
January 27, 2010
A very entertaining book about the "old" money class and how they are or are not, just like the rest of us. The author's families are from "old" money and with that comes a certain presitige along with certain expectations. My view is that they are rapidly becoming a dying breed. The old money has been eaten up by multiple generations and anything that is left has drastically shrunk in value by the 21st century. I, personally, am sorry to see them go. They have been replaced by the nouveau riche, and the wannabees whose view of money and responsibility are diametriacally opposed to their predecessors. The old money people spent their money on education, land, animals, conservation. They have a very healthy respect for money and did not use it to flaunt it on ostentatious showiness. The old monied people are also known as the "cave dwellers" for their lack of presence at society events and therefore not names to be found and recognized in the society pages. Tad Friend, the author, takes us inside their family dynamic and honestly, except for the money available for their education, they are like every healthy, loving family we all have or aspire to have. They enjoy a sweetness and humor that makes reading this book and spending some time with them a lot of fun. I highly recommend it!
July 27, 2011
It was somewhat reminiscent of my own upbringing - certain notes were very familiar; and I laughed out loud at some parts that particularly resonated.
I was bugged by his need for psychoanalysis. I suppose he didn't make the point well enough for me empathize. I felt he was petulant and foolish for wasting so much money in treatment because at no point in the book did I find his mother to be unfeeling and "not love him". Blech. There was one moment where he notices that she "seems to seek praise for her cooking or things that she did" and I thought, "well, perhaps that's because none of YOU noticed her efforts." Another section shows him in a heart-to-heart with his mother and she was sad, nearly crying that none of her adult children lived nearby and he responds, "Why do you think that is?" Smack. Well, he failed to make the point to me, anyway. I couldn't understand why they would be settling away from her for some sort of 'reason'. That part of his book annoyed me. Having said that, I did enjoy the portrait of old money and understand that he wasn't REALLY throwing the family under the bus, and I did have a lot of laughs reading it too. I wouldn't buy this book - unless you are on vacation like I was and don't have access to a library.
I was bugged by his need for psychoanalysis. I suppose he didn't make the point well enough for me empathize. I felt he was petulant and foolish for wasting so much money in treatment because at no point in the book did I find his mother to be unfeeling and "not love him". Blech. There was one moment where he notices that she "seems to seek praise for her cooking or things that she did" and I thought, "well, perhaps that's because none of YOU noticed her efforts." Another section shows him in a heart-to-heart with his mother and she was sad, nearly crying that none of her adult children lived nearby and he responds, "Why do you think that is?" Smack. Well, he failed to make the point to me, anyway. I couldn't understand why they would be settling away from her for some sort of 'reason'. That part of his book annoyed me. Having said that, I did enjoy the portrait of old money and understand that he wasn't REALLY throwing the family under the bus, and I did have a lot of laughs reading it too. I wouldn't buy this book - unless you are on vacation like I was and don't have access to a library.
July 15, 2011
Some great observations and anecdotes, and I kept on sending excerpts of passages to friends. But I think the NY Times review is right that at times the book feels a bit too crowded, making it difficult to keep track of all of the family members he describes, and that sometimes the wasp theme can be oppressive and get in the way of natural storytelling flow. Some of my favorite parts were his descriptions of the women in his life, particularly his mother--a Smith grad always contending with Sylvia Plath for poetry prizes--and the women that helped him breakthrough emotionally (both girlfriends and, of course, a therapist). While he wasn't as pithy, I think George Howe Colt's BIg House probably gives better insights into wasps and the Brahmin decline.
January 10, 2018
This book obviously has it's fans-but I'm not one of them. Maybe I'm not sophisticated or pretentious enough to understand it.
I figured the book would look into the sociology of Wasps, or explain where all the "cheerful money" went, or tell a story of how the family was now in poverty-but none of the above.
The book is neither amusing, sad or touching in any way-it just seems like tales of his family-which seems like an affluent, loving family, with some strange characters, (like any family). I also learned the author got laid often in his younger days.
The end of the book includes a reading group guide complete with questions/answers for discussion-which indicate the author really thinks highly of himself.
I figured the book would look into the sociology of Wasps, or explain where all the "cheerful money" went, or tell a story of how the family was now in poverty-but none of the above.
The book is neither amusing, sad or touching in any way-it just seems like tales of his family-which seems like an affluent, loving family, with some strange characters, (like any family). I also learned the author got laid often in his younger days.
The end of the book includes a reading group guide complete with questions/answers for discussion-which indicate the author really thinks highly of himself.
January 16, 2010
I'd like to thank Tad Friend for saving me tens of thousands of dollars on psychoanalysis. His heartbreaking, yet hopeful memoir of growing up Wasp has shed a crystalline light on so much of my own upbringing and experience. While I won't agree with Mary Karr's characterization of Cheerful Money as being "side-splittingly funny," I did unearth a fresh reserve of good humor to which I will turn the next time I visit my own Wasp hell.
Cheerful Money is witty, poignant and reassuring, but ultimately, it is just phenomenally good writing, hence the 5 stars.
Cheerful Money is witty, poignant and reassuring, but ultimately, it is just phenomenally good writing, hence the 5 stars.
October 30, 2009
I'd describe this book as "engrossing" -- every time I'd pick it up I'd have to force myself to stop. (However, ignore the blurbs on the back about it being "side-splittingly funny", because unless you find repression and resentment and detailed explanations of everyone's inheritances hilarious, it's not.) But it's very enjoyable, and the author likes to throw around his fancy vocab words, so it was like getting a free SAT review. Mumchance! Adumbrate! Asseverate!
October 3, 2010
I have to agree: this was not "side-splittingly hilarious". It was more like self-pityingly nostalgic. And utterly clueless. After a while, his casual dropping of travels taken, and luxe materials becomes annoying and ultimately off-putting. Reading this book, I felt I was somehow supposed to feel sorry for him, but I couldn't figure out the reason. Because his family's holdings and fortune have dwindled away? This is self-indulgence disguised as class history.
April 5, 2010
Another one I didn't get through. This is some dry writing.
If I can save anybody any time, this aren't the WASPs who wear Nantucket Reds and drink martinis, these are the WASPs who made their money in Pittsburgh steel, bottle up their emotions, and hate minorities.
If I can save anybody any time, this aren't the WASPs who wear Nantucket Reds and drink martinis, these are the WASPs who made their money in Pittsburgh steel, bottle up their emotions, and hate minorities.
April 4, 2011
Fascinating, marvelously written. Though they are difficult to love, Tad Friend's story of himself and his family offers an important portrait of a certain kind of American, at a certain time.
May 2, 2021
4/4.5 stars
Probably the first memoir I have ever read. Is 'Story of my life' a memoir? If it is, all the time that has passed has made the memories of me finding it extraordinarily moving are certainly forgotten but I think I did cry while reading it for the last time just before my tenth standard English board examination. So, even if it is not the first memoir I have ever read, it definitely moved me like it was. It was almost my favorite type of content to consume like This is us, the TV show. I don't want to focus on describing what that type of content is.
I decided to read this book after I read 'Prep' because I wanted to read more about the WASP world and what better than a 'part memoir, part family history' as the blurbs describe this, to explore more of the WASP world- so far off and unwelcoming for someone like me.
I don't want to spend a lot of time writing this review but I would mention this is what I wrote while reading it (cue my self-amused overblown opinion):
"I just want to write the whole book as little excerpts on littlest cute pieces of paper and scatter in my belongings so I keep coming across these beautiful anecdotes and WASP generalizations throughout my life. I should read more memoirs."
Damn, I should read more memoirs, imagine reading Nabokov but it's a memoir. I feel like memoirs are inherently beautiful just because of the way they are. Little vignettes of life, looked at with hindsight and perhaps nostalgia.
((I unexpectedly cried when his mom was trying to decide what should the grandchildren call her. The seriousness with which she wanted to ensure that she would be called a particular name that she decides reminded me of Kiran mami deciding she wants Chulbul to call her 'badi mummy'. I don't know if anyone else out of us four remembers this but I remember it so well. And hence, to Chulbul she was 'badi mummy' while if she hadn't made this decision, she would have been a regular taiji. I haven't heard Chulbul call her 'badi mummy' in years now. Last time I saw her was before I finished high school. I doubt Kiran mami has heard from her in a while either. I just sat and cried, not unlike all of us cousins did the last time I went home, thinking about the familial circumstances because of which we haven't seen our baby cousin in so long. She is so grown up now. I hope she has grown up into young girl version of the competitive, smart, brilliant child we know and remember.
After that, I kept ugly crying to various extents till after the author's mom died.))
Probably the first memoir I have ever read. Is 'Story of my life' a memoir? If it is, all the time that has passed has made the memories of me finding it extraordinarily moving are certainly forgotten but I think I did cry while reading it for the last time just before my tenth standard English board examination. So, even if it is not the first memoir I have ever read, it definitely moved me like it was. It was almost my favorite type of content to consume like This is us, the TV show. I don't want to focus on describing what that type of content is.
I decided to read this book after I read 'Prep' because I wanted to read more about the WASP world and what better than a 'part memoir, part family history' as the blurbs describe this, to explore more of the WASP world- so far off and unwelcoming for someone like me.
I don't want to spend a lot of time writing this review but I would mention this is what I wrote while reading it (cue my self-amused overblown opinion):
"I just want to write the whole book as little excerpts on littlest cute pieces of paper and scatter in my belongings so I keep coming across these beautiful anecdotes and WASP generalizations throughout my life. I should read more memoirs."
Damn, I should read more memoirs, imagine reading Nabokov but it's a memoir. I feel like memoirs are inherently beautiful just because of the way they are. Little vignettes of life, looked at with hindsight and perhaps nostalgia.
((I unexpectedly cried when his mom was trying to decide what should the grandchildren call her. The seriousness with which she wanted to ensure that she would be called a particular name that she decides reminded me of Kiran mami deciding she wants Chulbul to call her 'badi mummy'. I don't know if anyone else out of us four remembers this but I remember it so well. And hence, to Chulbul she was 'badi mummy' while if she hadn't made this decision, she would have been a regular taiji. I haven't heard Chulbul call her 'badi mummy' in years now. Last time I saw her was before I finished high school. I doubt Kiran mami has heard from her in a while either. I just sat and cried, not unlike all of us cousins did the last time I went home, thinking about the familial circumstances because of which we haven't seen our baby cousin in so long. She is so grown up now. I hope she has grown up into young girl version of the competitive, smart, brilliant child we know and remember.
After that, I kept ugly crying to various extents till after the author's mom died.))
October 10, 2024
In 2009, Tad Friend, a New Yorker staff writer, published Cheerful Money: Me, my Family, and the Last Days of WASP Splendor. Studded with many eccentric family members, the book portrays Friend's mother Elizabeth as a talented poet at Smith and dedicated homemaker; his father historian/college president Theodore Wood Friend, a man who wavered in his role as father. We learn the origin of the book’s title when the author explains, Mom and Dad “set aside three glass jars in a kitchen drawer, and whenever one of us demonstrated good humor under duress or was spontaneously helpful, they would drop a quarter into the appropriate jar.” (111)
While WASPs had dominated the American social scene for centuries, their fortunes and influence began to falter in the 1960s, a decline Friend details in his own lineage. He does not hesitate to discuss examples of moral failings and racial bias in his White/Anglo-Saxon/Protestant heritage. As a young Brooks Brothers-clad youth, Tad Friend appraises his family history as he begins to carve out his niche in society, one he can comfortably embrace. If you enjoy memoir, intergenerational relationships and a cultural study, Cheerful Money may be your next good read.
While WASPs had dominated the American social scene for centuries, their fortunes and influence began to falter in the 1960s, a decline Friend details in his own lineage. He does not hesitate to discuss examples of moral failings and racial bias in his White/Anglo-Saxon/Protestant heritage. As a young Brooks Brothers-clad youth, Tad Friend appraises his family history as he begins to carve out his niche in society, one he can comfortably embrace. If you enjoy memoir, intergenerational relationships and a cultural study, Cheerful Money may be your next good read.
August 19, 2018
This book could have been subtitled “A WASP Scion Undergoes Analysis.” And good for Tad Friend; his 13 (!) years of analysis no doubt provided the initial context for these reasoned, thoughtful and ultimately heartfelt discussions of his own personal history as well as literally generations of his family. It no doubt enabled him to see the patterns of behavior from previous generations that ripple in our own lives. (Plus his book royalties at least will start to make a dent in the significant outlay psychiatry entails, regardless of whatever the insurance company kicked in.)
Given his association with The New Yorker, it’s no surprise Friend is a superb writer who holds one’s interest, and its to his credit that the reader is able to keep the large cast of characters straight, albeit while doing a lot of flipping back to the family tree at the beginning of the book.
Given his association with The New Yorker, it’s no surprise Friend is a superb writer who holds one’s interest, and its to his credit that the reader is able to keep the large cast of characters straight, albeit while doing a lot of flipping back to the family tree at the beginning of the book.
May 23, 2018
Oh my my my my. This book took me two (or is it three now?!) years to read and for no reason that I can determine, became a bit of a white whale. But I've done it!
WASPs are able to document their own former glory and long demise in a way that is at once wistful, personal, coldly analytical, and a bit insufferable. And yet I continue to be drawn in, often reading particularly outrageous or interesting passages of Friend's book to my Sweetie. I'll steal an analogy from the film Barcelona. WASPs life is kind of a child's "ant farm" to entertain those of us looking on from the outside. "The only problem is, I kind of hate ants."
WASPs are able to document their own former glory and long demise in a way that is at once wistful, personal, coldly analytical, and a bit insufferable. And yet I continue to be drawn in, often reading particularly outrageous or interesting passages of Friend's book to my Sweetie. I'll steal an analogy from the film Barcelona. WASPs life is kind of a child's "ant farm" to entertain those of us looking on from the outside. "The only problem is, I kind of hate ants."
June 17, 2017
I enjoyed this; the writing is excellent. But many of Friend's forebears are not quite as interesting as he believes, and sometimes it's hard to figure out who's who. I also have problems with people who never quite get over the school or university they attended, as if it was the most important thing that ever happened to them. Perhaps this is because I lived most of my real life outside of school. But he's witty and sort of self-analytical and has a fine turn of phrase.
July 17, 2019
A fascinating window into the Wasp world and the experience of being on the declining end of that socio-economic group.
It would be interesting to read this paired with Dr. Ruby Payne's "A Framework for Understanding Poverty", a text I read in my education classes, which, contrary to its title, discusses some of the tendencies of members of the low, middle, and upper classes. I recalled some of the information from this text as I read "Cheerful".
It would be interesting to read this paired with Dr. Ruby Payne's "A Framework for Understanding Poverty", a text I read in my education classes, which, contrary to its title, discusses some of the tendencies of members of the low, middle, and upper classes. I recalled some of the information from this text as I read "Cheerful".
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