![]() ![]() Though my parents gave me love and learning and all the comforts, I believed I could go it alone. ![]() I believed my character had been formed by charged moments and impressions - the drift of snow, the peal of church bells, the torrent of light cascading through the elms out front into our sunporch. I believed, then, that my family was not my fate. As my grandparents happened to constitute a Wasp compass, the way ahead was marked in all directions: I could proceed as a Robinson like Grandma Tim’s family (loquacious, madcap, sometimes unhinged) a Pierson like Grandpa John’s family (bristling with brains) a Holton like Grandma Jess’s family (restless, haughty show ponies) or a Friend like Grandpa Ted’s family (moneyed, clubbable, and timid). When I graduated from Shipley, a small prep school in Bryn Mawr, my father’s mother, Grandma Jess, wrote to congratulate me on my academic record: “A truly tremendous achievement - but then I could expect nothing less due to your marvelous background - Robinson, Pierson, Holton, Friend!” I remember scowling at her airy blue script, noting the point - after the first dash - where the compliment turned into a eugenic claim. The memoir is most engaging when he keeps closest to home the scenes with Friend’s parents are touching and poignant.Īt the beginning of the book, Friend writes, “I am a Wasp because I harbored a feeling of disconnection from my parents, as they had from their parents, and their parents had from their parents.” Cheerful Money is Friend’s funny and enlightening way of piecing together that disconnect.Įliza Borné recently graduated from Wellesley (and is not a Wasp). ![]() Through it all, Friend falls in (and out) of love-multiple times-and deals with the knowledge that when his kids are grown, they won’t be Wasps. ![]() Clearly an expert on the breed, Friend sprinkles hilarious aphorisms throughout the text: “Wasps name their dogs after liquor and their cars after dogs and their children after their ancestors” “Wasps emerge from the womb wrinkly and cautious, already vice presidents, already fifty-two.” In Cheerful Money: Me, My Family, and the Last Days of Wasp Splendor, Friend, a staff writer at The New Yorker, writes a multi-generational portrait of his family, an impressive set of Wasps whose ancestors include a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Not if Tad Friend has anything to say about it. Dan Cryer, from a review of Macy’s book on Salon.The economy has tanked, unemployment’s up and we’ve all got better things to do than read about the woes and ruminations of prep school-educated rich folks, right? Caitlin Macy, The Fundamentals of Play: A Novel (New York: Random House, 2000), 185.ģ. Tad Friend, Cheerful Money: Me, My Family, and the Last Days of Wasp Splendor (New York: Little, Brown, 2009), 53.Ģ. There were no aristocrats on the Mayflower, after all, which we should all be well to remember.ġ. So we muddle along, carrying ahead our folkways, trying to locate ourselves in a land that is not so clearly made for us, save for those of our people who have re-discovered and embraced the savvy and pluck that got us to the top of the heap in the first place. In the meantime, we try to address the fallout from this fact: that each generation is prepared for a world it does not inherit, something that has been especially true since World War II. And we thought the brave new world of instant, media-friendly celebrity had killed all that.” 3 So we’ll see. It just lies low for a while, resurfacing when we’re not looking. For as Dan Cryer wryly noted in his review of The Fundamentals of Play, “Old money never dies. My own peers were the last to be raised through our minorities without the influence of widespread access to high-speed internet, but I find myself wary of making predictions that this, now, means the end. Friend (b.1962), has both the silver spoon and the aspirations laid down in conformity with generations before. Macy (b.1971), who herself follows a decade behind Mr. This blogger, who follows roughly ten years after Ms. In her 2000 novel The Fundamentals of Play Caitlin Macy wrote, in the guise of her narrator, of hers as “the last generation of the century to come of age, and the first one that wanted to be as much like our parents’ as possible.” 2īoth authors are right, in their way, even as what they have written is inaccurate. In his recent book Cheerful Money, Tad Friend has written that his “generation was the last to receive silver christening cups and to be taken shopping for the chain mail of adulthood– camel hair coats and Brooks Bros. ![]()
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