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

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, Tad 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 age-old traditions and expectations.  Part memoir, part family history, and part cultural study of the long swoon of the American Wasp,Cheerful Moneyis a captivating examination of a cultural crack-up and a man trying to escape its wreckage.

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.