It would include Friend’s description of the “WASP fridge,” its “out-of-season grapes, seltzer, and vodka. The best of these mini-books would concern the symbols of WASPdom. I’d just like to imagine the book, for a moment, in three bindings rather than one, with the history of Tad Friend’s family, Friend’s reading of WASP culture, and his memoir of his own life - the three stories mixed together in Cheerful Money - each standing on its own. Not that I’m suggesting anyone chop it up with a kitchen knife, as Janet Malcolm did to The Making of Americans by Gertrude Stein. It would be possible to make three good, small books of Cheerful Money. This review originally appeared on the literary website, The Second Pass: He spent his inheritance almost entirely on therapy and analysis. He knows that he sounds like a rich spoiled brat, and he's okay with it, and he points it out, and it's kind of funny. The fact that Friend is delusional about WASPs fading away is tempered by the fact that he is also incredibly self-aware and self-deprecating. That whole shtick about bein' a brush-clearin' cowboy down on the ranch was just PR to get people to see past the old money, the Yale education, and the New England background.) George Bush, on the other hand, is a WASP through and through. (Speaking of WASP politicians, Friend points out something that made me laugh quite hard: Bill Clinton is a white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant, but he'll never be a WASP, because poor people from Arkansas can never be WASPs. Take a quick look at Congress and see how many are WASPs. (The author thinks the new-economy-internet-types are the new power players in the country.) Take a look around your company's board of directors and tally up how many of them are WASPS. It truly takes a WASP to believe that WASPS are a dying breed. (No, this is not the same thing as when the bees died because of cell phones.) The author is a WASP, and the book is about how the WASPs are a dying breed. This book was alternately entertaining and bewildering. I'm glad he wrote the book, I'm glad that I don't have anything to do with his world, and I am so thankful to have been raised in California. I loved the meandering pace, and there is a great payback at the end of the book when he marries Amanda H. Friend's own story is interwoven, not always chronologically, with his family's and the chapters are grouped around a name or phrase that takes on resonance as the chapter progresses. It's beautifully written, and the structure of the narrative is fluid. Reading this book made me understand and then ask myself, "Who cares?" When I got to Smith I just couldn't understand the culture and why traditions there mattered to people and how they knew what to do. I'm glad that I did read it because it explained to me exactly why I hated going to college in Massachusetts so much. I read it because I have a big girlcrush on Amanda Hesser, the NY Times food writer and founder of Food 52 web community, and Tad Friend's wife. But also clearly a loving family as well. A lot of what Friend characterizes as "Wasp" is just a sad family dynamic. I liked so much of this book, and then I thought "Big whoop" about a lot of it. (Oct.It's interesting that so many of the goodreads reviews about Cheerful Money are ambivalent. (“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. 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. 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. “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 Yorkerīrought 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.
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