Cheerful Money, Tad Friend
Cheerful Money, Tad Friend
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Cheerful Money
Me, My Family, and the Last Days of Wasp Splendor

Author: Tad Friend

Narrator: William Dufris

Unabridged: 10 hr 42 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 03/05/2010

Synopsis

Tad Friend's family is nothing if not illustrious: his father was president of Swarthmore College, and at Smith his mother came in second in a poetry contest judged by W. H. Auden to Sylvia Plath. For centuries, Wasps like his ancestors dominated American life. But then, in the '60s, their fortunes began to fall. As a young man, Friend noticed that his family tree, for all its glories, was full of alcoholics, depressives, and reckless eccentrics. Yet his identity had already been shaped by the family's ageold traditions and expectations. 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 crackup and a man trying to escape its wreckage.

About Tad Friend

Tad Friend is a staff writer at the New Yorker, where he writes the magazine’s “Letter from California.” Prior to that, he wrote regularly for Outside, New York, and Esquire and wrote travel stories from all seven continents. He plays golf and squash and watches a lot of television. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife, Amanda Hesser, and their children, Walker and Addie.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Jennifer on December 18, 2010

It's interesting that so many of the goodreads reviews about Cheerful Money are ambivalent. I liked so much of this book, and then I thought "Big whoop" about a lot of it. A lot of what Friend characterizes as "Wasp" is just a sad family dynamic. But also clearly a loving family as well. In short, f......more

Goodreads review by Michael on October 16, 2009

This review originally appeared on the literary website, The Second Pass: It would be possible to make three good, small books of Cheerful Money. 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. I’d just like to imagine......more

Goodreads review by Sarah on February 13, 2010

This book is really hard for me to rate. I'm afraid I can't agree with many of the illustrious blurbs on the back cover--I didn't find it stunning or especially moving, and I didn't find it funny, humorous OR hilarious, as it was variously called. Graydon Carter said it "goes down like a bittersweet......more

Goodreads review by Josh on August 16, 2016

A warm, fuzzy and familiar sweater of a book. Friend's spiel is essentially that he comes from American nobility, a venerable WASP clan that primed him for greatness exactly at the moment that its empire was crumbling under the blows of meritocracy and transparency. (Crumbling, though even today one......more

Goodreads review by Ciara on February 09, 2010

sad to say, i didn't really "get" this book. mary karr (an author i like quite a bit) gave it a good blurb, but i apparently failed to see what she saw. it was not "side-splittingly" hilarious, & mary karr is no WASP, so supposedly you don't have to be one to understand the humor. maybe you have to......more

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