8/3/2023 0 Comments Cheerful money tad friend"This seems to me at once sad, exhilarating, and inconceivable."", " splendid book. " Walker and Addie might not even think of themselves as Wasps," writes Friend, of his twins born in 2006. There is so much grace here, the angry young man that denied his destiny now a middle-aged father who sees his place on the continuum - and is conflicted. But he also is sad, sometimes angry, and in an effort to understand why his family withheld and bequeathed affection, hauls us with him over the emotional shoals. An insightful, highly humorous memoir, exceptionally well-written., " Cheerful Money: Me, My Family, and the Last Days of Wasp Splendoris taxonomy-as-memoir, an absolutely brilliant gift to the reader, wherein Friend essentially holds open the door to the exclusive club. This will become a classic.", The world laid bare here in Tad Friend's winning voice emerges from struggles he's waged in his heart.Cheerful Moneyis a terrific memoir about the nuances of loss, wrenching revelations from a golden boy who has chosen to face the cost of a legacy of denial., 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. It has the verve of Nick and Nora Charles with their silver martini shakers, and some of the mournful insights of Kafka. Having had my own spell married into such a clan of American aristocrats, I found Friend's tale side-splittingly funny and touching, without being the least predictable. Tad Friend's tome on WASP-itude goes down effervescent as a glass of champagne. 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., PRAISE FOR CHEERFUL MONEY : "Every now and then, a book comes out that's so well written, so beautifully carved and psychologically true that its subject almost doesn't matter-digging a sewer to Rwanda or suburban gardening. With compassion, humility, and wit, he transforms his exotically accomplished and eccentrically intelligent Wasp relatives into a winsomely flawed American Everyfamily., With its WASPish brew of aunts, alcoholics, and dashed promise (not to mention an assortment of Inkys, Wassas, Lettys, Goggys, and Hannys),Cheerful Moneygoes down like a bitter-sweet late-summer cocktail made with a jigger of Cheever and a splash of Wodehouse., 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. Read it also for high comedy and here and there a signature Waspish sting.", Friend is a ruthlessly brilliant social taxidermist and a joyous chronicler of life's telling bric-a-brac. His mother would later become an interior designer and painter.A brilliantly braided book: a hilarious coming-of-age memoir, a sharp stake through the zombie heart of the WASP ascendency, and the bravest work of filial love I've ever read., "Early on inCheerful Money, Tad Friend writes, "Grievances in my family are like underground coal fires: hard to detect and nearly impossible to extinguish." This fine memoir is about some of those grievances and also about the money, remorselessly leaking away, a circumstance that leads to the book's subtitle: The last days of Wasp splendor. Friend wrote in 2006 after the death of his mother Elizabeth Groesbeck Pierson, a complicated woman who put her dreams of writing poetry aside to be a good wife to Theodore “Dorie” Wood Friend III, an historian who became the president of Swarthmore College. The book originated with a New Yorker article Mr. And they believe in putting on a good face, especially in hard times. They tolerate family members’ eccentricities, as long as they show up for Christmas. They name their dogs after liquor and their cars after their dogs. Friend says in the book, won’t talk about money unless it’s to do with necessary expenses (that rules out any mention of income or elective expenditures). The Wall Street Journal also spoke to Friend: But the shorthand definition would be someone with a fancy name who went to a fancy school and grew up mostly in the Northeast. It takes in people like Bill Clinton, who is technically a WASP, but doesn’t really fit anyone’s mental picture of one. New Yorker writer/ Brooklyn Heights resident Tad Friend is interviewed in the Arizona Republic about his new book, Cheerful Money: Me, My Family, and the Last Days of Wasp Splendor :Īrizona Republic: Question: What is a WASP?Īnswer: The standard definition, “White Anglo-Saxon Protestant,” seems to me overly broad.
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