Witty, searching, and profound, In the Early Times is an enduring meditation on the shifting tides of memory and the unsteady pillars on which every family rests. These discoveries make Tad reconsider his own role, as a father, as a husband, and as a son. It turns out that Tad has been self-destructing in the same way Day has-a secret each has kept from everyone, even themselves. Then Tad finds his father’s journal, a trove of passionate confessions that reveals a man entirely different from the exasperatingly logical father Day was so determined to be. Tad writes that “trying to reach him always felt like ice fishing.” Yet now Tad’s father, known to his family as Day, seems concerned chiefly with the flavor of ice cream in his bowl and, when pushed, interested only in reconsidering his view of Franklin Roosevelt. His father, an erudite historian and the former president of Swarthmore College, has long been gregarious and charming with strangers yet cerebral with his children. On others, he feels distinctly weary, troubled by his distance from millennial sensibilities or by his own face in the mirror, by a grimace that’s so like his father’s. Mon dieu Gothamists favorite New York Times food writer, Amanda Hesser, and husband New Yorker writer Tad Friend, are riding Segways in Paris for Slate. On some days he feels vigorous, on the brink of greatness when he plays tournament squash. Torn between two families, he careens between two stages in life. In his fifties, New Yorker writer Tad Friend is grappling with being a husband and a father as he tries to grasp who he is as a son. Maybe, just maybe, those answers will help you live your own life. ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New YorkerĪlmost everyone yearns to know their parents more thoroughly before they die, to solve some of those lifelong mysteries. Brilliant, intensely moving.”-William Finnegan, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Barbarian Days “How often does a memoir build to a stomach-churning, I-can’t-breathe climax in its final pages?. Friend's book is such a winning family chronicle that the decline he describes is less a fall than an exhilarating ride, less sad than heartwarmingly comic.In this “dazzling” (John Irving) memoir, acclaimed New Yorker staff writer Tad Friend reflects on the pressures of middle age, exploring his relationship with his dying father as he raises two children of his own. "American Wasps are now as rare as black truffles, and rarely has their story been told so candidly or entertainingly as it is in Tad Friend's wonderful new memoir, Cheerful Money. Recognizing that it's his inherited duty to entertain and amuse his audience, even as he's occasionally serving up grisly confessions and nut-hard kernels of emotional truth."- Maureen Corrigan, NPR "Friend's memoir, called "Cheerful Money," is a droll, psychologically astute and sometimes nostalgic look backward at the WASP world that was. " Cheerful Money: Me, My Family, and the Last Days of Wasp Splendor is taxonomy-as-memoir, an absolutely brilliant gift to the reader, wherein Friend essentially holds open the door to the exclusive club."- The Oregonian The tone he strikes is elegaic, even tender (at times) as he chronicles the futile pursuit of gracious living, now sinking into the "ruinous romance of loss.""- The Christian Science Monitor "Friend's talents are well suited to his material. Friend has written an elegiac family history-cum-cultural taxonomy of a declining empire."- Wall Street Journal Oh, reader, you are in for a treat."- San Francisco Chronicle Tad Friend does fall far enough from the tree to give us a delightfully rendered account of not only his self-discovery but an examination of "The Last Days of Wasp Splendor." It is gorgeously written. An insightful, highly humorous memoir, exceptionally well-written."- Peter Matthiessen, author of Shadow Country " Cheerful Money, by a self-stinging Wasp, is sharp as well as blunt about this problematic caste, but also rather proud of its salty aspects. Friend animates a deeply private, aristocratic way of life with detailed, moving intimacy." - Susan Cheever "In Tad Friend's stunning memoir about the lost world of the Wasp elite, the Hamptons' Georgica Pond comes to seem as Edenic as Thoreau's Walden. This will become a classic."- Mary Karr, author of Lit and The Liars' Club It has the verve of Nick and Nora Charles with their silver martini shakers, and some insights mournful as Kafka's. " Cheerful Money is side-splittingly funny and touching, without being the least predictable.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |