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

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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 The Washington Post

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com The more diverse America becomes, the more remarkable it must seem that its founders were of a single creed and color: Yet it was white Anglo-Saxon Protestants who wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, establishing principles of a free nation, and Bostonian Wasps who led abolitionism. Today you'd be hard-pressed to find a city -- even in hidebound New England -- where old Yankee families rule. 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, a staff writer for the New Yorker, is a descendant of a long line of Grotonians and Yalies who ruled America from imposing manses, on land stretching from Pittsburgh to Vermont. But now, "at a time when fewer than one in five Americans have any British ancestors," he tells us, "Wasps increasingly doubt their wider currency. Once the most American of people, we failed at the American necessity: assimilation. So we gaze out from the old game preserves -- Bar Harbor, Watch Hill, Jupiter Island -- and wonder how it all came to this." 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. His mother, Elizabeth Pierson Friend, was a marvelous eccentric: a gifted cook and painter who, as a sophomore at Smith, "came in second to Sylvia Plath in a poetry contest judged by W.H. Auden." She was deeply interested in the business of a well-run house, good, spirited repartee and a suitably splendid Christmas. Her grandfather, George Wilson Pierson, a Yale man with glittering eyes and a sly sense of humor, had written many histories of the college as well as a distinguished biographical study, "Tocqueville in America." But her family had even deeper Wasp roots: A Pierson had been Yale's first rector; another relative, the college's first student. Friend's father, Theodore Wood Friend III, is a historian and former president of Swarthmore College, with an "Easter Island-size head" stuffed with learning. A forceful speaker who nevertheless finds it difficult to communicate ordinary human emotion, he is portrayed as a singularly touching figure. "He husbanded our declining fortunes, a decline that, as he recognized, mirrored the broader Wasp ebb: the outflow of maids and grandfather clocks and cocktail shakers brimming with gin." This seemingly golden couple belonged to a generation that was the last to grow up with servants "who took care of the meals and the children and the bother." No longer would the crusts be trimmed from their children's sandwiches or the gentlemen be separated from the ladies after dinner, nor did they consult the "Social Register" and believe that the only colleges their progeny should attend were the Ivies or the Seven Sisters. In a quickly evolving America more attuned to change and growth than to tradition, the tribe of Friends and Piersons fell behind. Wasps may still run foundations, universities, antiquarian societies, nature conservancies or estate law, according to Friend, but you'd have trouble finding them in Internet start-ups, high-tech industries or electric-car manufactories. Friend's family once saw its duty as "leading without fanfare," and, blindsided by history, they "continued to see this as their role even as they began to follow . . . even as they fell so far behind they lost touch entirely. Their accelerating crack-up was like a sonic boom: you heard it only after the Concorde was gone." But oh the days of the picnics in the garden! The tennis, the cavorting dogs and the bright sound of martinis splashing into the cut crystal glasses! And oh the days when dotty uncles pursued love affairs from Zihuatanejo to Marseilles! Never mind that a Wasp fridge is like a bachelor's -- perennially empty. Or that the trust fund is gone. More Christmasian than Christian, as comfortable in black tie as sprawled on a shabby sofa, the Wasps of "Cheerful Money" are lovable old coots with a high sense of patriotism and purpose. Not for them the Wasp look so artfully marketed by Madison Avenue. That, says Friend, is more properly called preppy, and "preppies are infantile and optimistic, forever stuck at age seventeen; Wasps emerge from the womb wrinkly and cautious, already vice presidents, already fifty-two." The gradual evaporation of Wasps from the ruling class did not mean that they disappeared entirely from culture. Indeed, Wasps remain very much in our cultural mind's eye. Hollywood saw a big market in the Wasp image, as Friend reminds us, and busily went about transforming Issur Danielovitch into Kirk Douglas and Betty Joan Perske into Lauren Bacall. More recently, an idealized Philadelphia Main Line or Nantucket vision was brilliantly mass-marketed by Martha Stewart, a Polish-American Catholic, not to mention Ralph Lauren, who was born Ralph Lifshitz, a son of Russian Jewish immigrants. Friend's book is a fascinating mix of cultural, family and personal history. And yet, although Friend writes dazzlingly about his relatives and ancestors, he is less successful in writing about himself. That is to say: He is so wrought up about "Wasp reticence" that he ends up talking too much. Do we really want endless details about his doomed affairs with Italian and Jewish girlfriends? Do we care about long-winded bouts on the psychiatrist's couch? Once he commits the uncharacteristic act of baring his Wasp soul, all Pandora's box is unleashed upon us. Whoever imagined you'd want to tell a Wasp to muzzle it? It hardly matters. "Cheerful Money" absolutely sings in the chapters that count. 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: And this is good old Boston, The home of the bean and the cod, Where the Lowells talk only to Cabots, And the Cabots talk only to God.
Copyright 2009, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 368 pages
• Publisher: Little, Brown and Company; 1 Min Abr edition (September 21, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0316003174
• ISBN-13: 978-0316003179
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.8 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #4,067 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

27 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Like someone else's vacation photos...., October 10, 2009

By	Clare (New York) - See all my reviews

...this book is best enjoyed by the people who were there.

Memoirs to me are an exercise in self indulgence unless the person writing has had a particularly interesting life. The author of this book hasn't.

He seems like a nice man, and is obviously a talented writer but perhaps he spends too much time with people of the same background (The New Yorker is hardly a mag for the masses) because he seems to think that nutty relatives, disappointments in childhood, the sad ends of promising people, and parents you love but don't always understand, belong exclusively to the life of a WASP. I'm very much not of his culture and yet I've experienced much of what he talks about. There's a snobbishness in thinking that his background elevates his memories to memoir status. Maybe that's the only thing about the book that is uniquely WASP. I get the sense of a man in mid-life trying to figure himself out through the lens of his childhood. Good for him. But it's not unique, and it's not interesting enough for a book.

26 of 34 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 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.

21 of 28 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 (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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.