Cheerful Money: Me, My Family, and the Last Days of Wasp Splendor [Hardcover]

Tad Friend (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 21, 2009

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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

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.)
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From Bookmarks Magazine

Critics' explanations of Cheerful Money's appeal were as subtle as one of the intricate social rituals the book describes. Friend is a child of privilege, yet his emotional earnestness and somewhat elegiac tone more than make up for readers' potential resentment. His book is a flight from his WASPish past, yet in its thoroughness, it also constitutes a kind of defense of WASPs' peculiar culture. In any case, even reviewers who seemed to read Cheerful Money with something of a sneer admitted that its form is original, its prose well-crafted, and its characters hilarious.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 368 pages
• Publisher: Little, Brown and Company; 1 edition (September 21, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0316003174
• ISBN-13: 978-0316003179
• Product Dimensions: 5.8 x 1.2 x 8.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (24 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #376,473 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

58 of 68 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Hilariously wistful, October 1, 2009

By 

Chris Hudson (Seattle, WA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Cheerful Money: Me, My Family, and the Last Days of Wasp Splendor (Hardcover)

This is a wonderful book. In an effort to understand his own rather constrained, Waspy nature, Tad Friend researches the lives of his various relatives--for the most part cheerful enough affairs on the surface (most of the time), but seething with a kind of quiet heartbreak. Friend himself would seem the picture of contentment: a successful NEW YORKER writer, a droll attractive fellow with loads of droll attractive friends, he yet feels a numbness of the soul that he can't quite understand. Coming to terms with this--the Wasp emotional inheritance--is the burden of this book. Nicely structured with a lot of contrapuntal set pieces about this or that relative, this or that girlfriend, the story draws one irresistibly along--and one might as well say it: I laughed and I cried, pretty much in equal parts. What I liked best about the book was the (how to put it?) companionability of the author--like a charming (but hitherto somewhat aloof) old pal who has a few too many one night and decides to bare his soul, half-seriously, though his audience comes to take him very seriously indeed.

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Limited Appeal, December 31, 2009

By 

KBArch "BedtimeReader" (Cambridge, MA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Cheerful Money: Me, My Family, and the Last Days of Wasp Splendor (Hardcover)

My local librarian asked me why there was a long list of requests for Cheerful Money. "It must be good," she said. When I told her that it really wasn't very good she said, "well, it must have some kind of appeal." And it does...to a limited audience.

First of all, Cheerful Money is indeed not a very good book, but it will find a place in the genre of Wasp chronicles. The structure is meandering. At points the book is truly boring. And the characters never really come to life. I could see these flaws when I spent about 30 minutes in the aisle of my local book store giving it a speed-read and deciding that it was not worth buying. And yet, a few weeks later I was one of those who requested it from the library. I think if you have little or a lot of WASP in you or have lived close to one or many of them you are drawn to reading about this world and its dissolution in the second half of the 20th century. Maybe I needed that assurance that the WASP world had lost its relevance so I would feel safe in abandoning any aspirations that might have lingered from my own Seven Sister/ Ivy League college days.

Admittedly I skipped over many paragraphs and at least twice considering abandoning the book. But I was glad I finished it, even though the whole bit towards the end about the author's psychoanalysis and failed relationships was lame. Mr Friend is a good writer, better than shows in this book. He has a knack for finding just the right metaphor.

You will enjoy the book if you are interested in a glimpse into this bygone world. For a tighter and more interesting narrative of the same subject, George Colt's Big House has more poignancy and a surer social (as well as artistic) compass.

38 of 47 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Too much Tad, not enough WASP..., September 30, 2009

By 

D. C. Carrad "augustabookman" (Augusta, GA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Cheerful Money: Me, My Family, and the Last Days of Wasp Splendor (Kindle Edition)

I'm a WASP with a similar background to the author's and somewhat of a pushover for books like this (John Cheever and John O'Hara are favorites) but this souffle fell flat. Some of the author's relatives have interesting moments, but not enough to sustain a book for outsiders, and there is far too much whingeing about his own troubles. This book should have been privately printed in leather covers and given to the author's relatives at Christmas.