8/15/2023 0 Comments Cheerful money tad friendFriend shares equally in the vices and virtues of his clan, and they often trade places depending on context. He admits to coming across throughout his life as cold, aloof, shy and untrusting, and in his memoir Friend first strikes you as the archetypal uptight and repressed WASP, a master of the punctilioes of social form but incapable of feeling or caring about anything. For Tad Friend, the cost of being born privileged was 13 years of psychotherapy.Īs a narrator, Friend is a mirror of the very problems that plague him. The closer he looked at his family and its milieu, the more he saw drunks, depressives and general pathology. His ancestors had done things like sign the Declaration of Independence.įriend came of age in the ’70s when WASPdom was in the throes of decadence, a noble but faulted tribe that carried within it the seed of its own undoing. His father was president of Swarthmore, and his grandfather had received the highest grades ever in the history of Yale. Tad Friend is a staff writer at The New Yorker and a graduate of Shipley and Harvard. Like the tribe of WASPs itself, Friend and his book have an even amount of vices and virtues. Very belatedly I’m finally getting around to a post on Tad Friend’s “Cheerful Money: Me, My Family, and the Last Days of WASP Splendor,” which was released last year. Bottoms up.Today we revisit this post from 2010 on the rise and fall of WASPdom. He's still unlikely to fill his Cheerful Money jar anytime soon, but we're the richer for such salty observations as why Wasps like rough-housing with dogs (it allows them to be affectionate and get dirty), how they pronounce buffet ("boo-fay," not "buff-ay") and use euphemisms to disguise their heavy drinking (they never have another instead, they refresh or repair the drink already in hand). Perhaps equally critical is the insight gained from having spent "my inheritance and then some" on 13 years of psychoanalysis to assuage a "feeling of disconnection" that began in early childhood. This is thanks, in part, to reportorial skills sharpened by years of work at The New Yorker, for whom he files dispatches about another quirky subculture - Hollywood - for his "Letters from California" (despite living in Brooklyn Heights with his wife, New York Times food writer Amanda Hesser, and their twins). But, drawn to "the ruinous romance of loss," Friend is one of the least whiny and most incisive insiders to chronicle this privileged world, and he does so with style and soul. Family estates, which once included a Pittsburgh mansion and a Vermont farm, are now reduced to a summer home on exclusive Georgica Pond on Long Island, which they rent to cover expenses.įriend is not the first to write about emotionally constipated ancestors, the waning of Wasp power or the painful erosion of beloved family holdings: George Howe Colt's The Big House springs to mind. Since the Great Depression, conservation and preservation have become the mainstays of the family, trying "to caulk the seams" of their leaky financial vessel. Paul's School and Yale, Friend diverged as far as Shipley and Harvard. While most of the men in his family attended St. His great-great grandfather employed 18 servants. His forebears came to America in the mid-17th century but didn't become "smashingly rich" - from steel, coal and banking - until the beginning of the 20th century. In a culture that values decorum and reticence, revealing private family matters requires gumption or, in Wasp-speak, "sand." Friend discovered that after his 2006 New Yorker profile of his late mother "rattled my family in ways that slowed the writing of this book yet clarified its true subject."īorn in 1962, Friend grew up in Buffalo, N.Y., and Swarthmore, Pa., where his father was president of Swarthmore College. Digby Baltzell, is both redundant and inexact, and he proceeds to delineate a more precise picture in his fond but probing personal history. He notes that the acronym for White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, popularized in 1964 by sociologist E. Using cash as a "behavioral-management tool" is just one Wasp peccadillo that Friend nails in Cheerful Money, a suave, sharp-witted, generally intoxicating but occasionally sobering expose of his native culture. Tad Friend's parents tried to entice their three children into "sunnier moods" with what they called "Cheerful Money," a 25-cent reward dropped into a glass jar whenever "one of us demonstrated good humor under duress or was spontaneously helpful." My husband's grandparents used to pay him a dollar an hour to nap.
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