American Wasps are now as rare as black truffles, and rarely has their story been told so candidly or entertainingly as it is in Tad Friend's wonderful new memoir, Cheerful Money …Friend's book is such a winning family chronicle that the decline he describes is less a fall than an exhilarating ride, less sad than heartwarmingly comic…a memorable hymn to a vanishing America. Exceptionally warm-hearted, full of good cheer, and ruthlessly funny, it may even have you singing along
Tad Friend's winsome memoir…recounts with amiable nostalgia, the foibles and predilections of a declining caste…The author's warmth and pleasant wit, his reliably graceful prose style, usually manage to carry the day.
Grievances in my family are like underground coal fires,” Friend confides, “hard to detect and nearly impossible to extinguish.” But a remembrance of his mother that appeared in the New Yorker brought many of those tensions to the surface; shortly afterward, his father accused him of being “a prisoner of Freudianism” for dwelling on the theme of emotional distance. Nevertheless, Friend pushes forward, combining family history and memoir as he recounts his youthful efforts to prove “my family was not my fate” and break away from the “cast of mind” circumscribed by his WASP upbringing—the firm handshakes, the summer homes, the university clubs. Friend knows exactly how privileged he is and recognizes that readers won't easily feel sorry for someone who can spend more than $160,000 on therapy. (“My birthright in wherewithal,” he quips, “seemed to me almost perfectly balanced by my birthright in repression.”) Instead of asking for sympathy, he works at showing how his efforts at emotional integration have begun to pay off, including the relationship with his own wife and children, in a story of cross-generational frustration and reconciliation that transcends class boundaries. 8 pages of b&w photo. (Oct.)
A New Yorker staff writer struggles to strike a prepossessing pose in a populous family photograph. Fully aware that his is a complicated story, Friend (Lost in Mongolia: Travels in Hollywood and Other Foreign Lands, 2001), provides a two-page family tree that rivals the Tudors' in complexity. The chart is a reader's dear friend, though, for it helps clarify quick allusions to "Timmie Robinson" and numerous others who occasionally pop up in the thick narrative, which interweaves accounts of his relatives' lives with ruminations on his childhood, schooling, lovers, career, travel, marriage, parenthood, privilege and psychotherapy. Friend often felt unloved and unloving, he writes, adding that he expended most of a $160,000 inheritance on 13 years of psychotherapy. He illuminates that period a bit in "Reconstruction," a chapter that also features accounts of his mother's obsessive remodeling of a house. We learn that Friend was an award-winning high-school student and a Harvard graduate who took home "a raft of prizes" at commencement. His father was president of Swarthmore College, his mother an aspiring poet and youthful rival of Sylvia Plath. The author bounced from girlfriend to girlfriend before finding his true love and current wife. Friend knows he's enjoyed some breaks in life-family summer homes in desirable places, notable relatives, money worries rather than poverty-and he's suitably ambivalent about it, waxing ironic and sometimes even waspish about the WASPy world of his nativity. He deals effectively with his mother's terminal struggles with cancer and with his father's emotional reserve. He tells us little about his writing-mostly that other people think it's wonderful-butnotes his initial difficulty at the New Yorker crafting "long pieces that fit together like jigsaw puzzles."Indeed, Friend's memoir is mostly in pieces that could use further assemblage. Agent: Amanda Urban/ICM
In Tad Friend’s stunning memoir about the lost world of the Wasp elite, the Hamptons’ Georgica Pond comes to seem as Edenic as Thoreau’s Walden . Friend animates a deeply private, aristocratic way of life with detailed, moving intimacy.”
American Wasps are now as rare as black truffles, and rarely has their story been told so candidly or entertainingly as it is in Tad Friend’s wonderful new memoir…Cheerful Money absolutely sings…This is a memorable hymn to a vanishing America. Exceptionally warm-hearted, full of good cheer, and ruthlessly funny, it may even have you singing along.”
With its Waspish brew of aunts, alcoholics, and dashed promise (not to mention an assortment of Inkys, Wassas, Lettys, Goggys, and Hannys), Cheerful Money goes down like a bittersweet late-summer cocktail made with a jigger of Cheever and a splash of Wodehouse.”
Cheerful Money offers a deadpan defense of the Wasp culture whose outline it simultaneously traces…pays homage to that stiff upper lip as more pervasive, complex, and ultimately beneficial than a mere question of upbringing.”
Cheerful Money , by a self-stinging Wasp, is sharp as well as blunt about this problematic caste, but also rather proud of its salty aspects. An insightful, highly humorous memoir, exceptionally well-written.”
A multi-generational portrait of his family, an impressive set of Wasps whose ancestors include a signer of the Declaration of Independence…Friend sprinkles hilarious aphorisms throughout the text…funny and enlightening.”
In a milieu that values decorum and reticence, revealing private family matters requires gumption—or, in Wasp-speak, ‘sand.’ Tad Friend shows the necessary grit in this suave, sharp-witted exposé of his native culture…[writing] with minimal whining and considerable style and soul.”
The Year’s Best Memoirs NPR
"Cheerful Money is side-splittingly funny and touching, without being the least predictable. It has the verve of Nick and Nora Charles with their silver martini shakers, and some insights mournful as Kafka's. This will become a classic."—Mary Karr , author of Lit and The Liars' Club Susan Cheever Cheerful Money , by a self-stinging Wasp, is sharp as well as blunt about this problematic caste, but also rather proud of its salty aspects. An insightful, highly humorous memoir, exceptionally well-written."—Peter Matthiessen , author of Shadow Country San Francisco Chronicle Wall Street Journal The Christian Science Monitor Cheerful Money: Me, My Family, and the Last Days of Wasp Splendor is taxonomy-as-memoir, an absolutely brilliant gift to the reader, wherein Friend essentially holds open the door to the exclusive club."—The Oregonian Maureen Corrigan , NPR Cheerful Money .... Friend's book is such a winning family chronicle that the decline he describes is less a fall than an exhilarating ride, less sad than heartwarmingly comic."—Washington Post
"American Wasps are now as rare as black truffles, and rarely has their story been told so candidly or entertainingly as it is in Tad Friend's wonderful new memoir, Cheerful Money .... Friend's book is such a winning family chronicle that the decline he describes is less a fall than an exhilarating ride, less sad than heartwarmingly comic."
"Friend's memoir, called "Cheerful Money," is a droll, psychologically astute and sometimes nostalgic look backward at the WASP world that was.... Recognizing that it's his inherited duty to entertain and amuse his audience, even as he's occasionally serving up grisly confessions and nut-hard kernels of emotional truth."
"Cheerful Money: Me, My Family, and the Last Days of Wasp Splendor is taxonomy-as-memoir, an absolutely brilliant gift to the reader, wherein Friend essentially holds open the door to the exclusive club."
"Friend's talents are well suited to his material.... The tone he strikes is elegaic, even tender (at times) as he chronicles the futile pursuit of gracious living, now sinking into the "ruinous romance of loss.""
The Christian Science Monitor
"Mr. Friend has written an elegiac family history-cum-cultural taxonomy of a declining empire."
"[A] splendid book.... Tad Friend does fall far enough from the tree to give us a delightfully rendered account of not only his self-discovery but an examination of "The Last Days of Wasp Splendor." It is gorgeously written.... Oh, reader, you are in for a treat."
"Cheerful Money , by a self-stinging Wasp, is sharp as well as blunt about this problematic caste, but also rather proud of its salty aspects. An insightful, highly humorous memoir, exceptionally well-written."
Peter Matthiessen - author of Shadow Country
"Cheerful Money is side-splittingly funny and touching, without being the least predictable. It has the verve of Nick and Nora Charles with their silver martini shakers, and some insights mournful as Kafka's. This will become a classic."
Mary Karr - author of Lit and The Liars' Club
"Cheerful Money , by a self-stinging Wasp, is sharp as well as blunt about this problematic caste, but also rather proud of its salty aspects. An insightful, highly humorous memoir, exceptionally well-written."
author of Shadow Country Peter Matthiessen
"Cheerful Money is side-splittingly funny and touching, without being the least predictable. It has the verve of Nick and Nora Charles with their silver martini shakers, and some insights mournful as Kafka's. This will become a classic."
author of Lit and The Liars' Club Mary Karr
Friend's memoir, called "Cheerful Money," is a droll, psychologically astute and sometimes nostalgic look backward at the WASP world that was.... Recognizing that it's his inherited duty to entertain and amuse his audience, even as he's occasionally serving up grisly confessions and nut-hard kernels of emotional truth.NPR
Cheerful Money is side-splittingly funny and touching, without being the least predictable. It has the verve of Nick and Nora Charles with their silver martini shakers, and some insights mournful as Kafka's. This will become a classic.author of Lit and The Liars' Club
