![]() ![]() “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. “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.” - BookPage “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…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.” - Publishers Weekly “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.” - AV Club “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… with minimal whining and considerable style and soul.” - NPR, The Year’s Best Memoirs Exceptionally warm-hearted, full of good cheer, and ruthlessly funny, it may even have you singing along.” - 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 absolutely sings…This is a memorable hymn to a vanishing America. An insightful, highly humorous memoir, exceptionally well-written.” - Peter Matthiessen, author of Shadow Country “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. (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. "I'd describe this book as "engrossing" - every time I'd pick it up I'd have to force myself to stop. 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. Yet his identity had already been shaped by the family’s age-old traditions and expectations. ![]() As a young man, Friend noticed that his family tree, for all its glories, was full of alcoholics, depressives, and reckless eccentrics. But then, in the ’60s, their fortunes began to fall. For centuries, Wasps like his ancestors dominated American life. Auden, his mother came in second-to Sylvia Plath. He lives in Brooklyn Heights.Tad Friend’s family is nothing if not illustrious: his father was president of Swarthmore College, and at a Smith college poetry contest judged by W. įriend is married to food writer Amanda Hesser, with whom he has twin children. His memoir, Cheerful Money: Me, My Family, and the Last Days of Wasp Splendor, was published in 2009. In 2001, he published "Lost in Mongolia: Travels in Hollywood and Other Foreign Lands", a collection of his articles. His work there includes the magazine's "Letter from California". He was educated at The Shipley School and Harvard University.įriend was a contributing editor at various publications, including Esquire, prior to becoming a staff writer at The New Yorker in 1998. Theodore Porter "Tad" Friend (born September 25, 1962) is a staff writer for The New Yorker who writes the magazine's "Letter from California".īorn in Buffalo, New York, Friend was raised there and in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, where his father, Theodore Friend, was president of Swarthmore College. JSTOR ( December 2020) ( template removal help).Contentious material about living persons that is unsourced or poorly sourced must be removed immediately from the article and its talk page, especially if potentially libelous. This biography of a living person needs additional citations for verification. ![]()
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