Harvard Book Store; WGBH Forum Network; Cheerful Money: Me, My Family, and the Last Days of Wasp Splendor

Tonight I'm very excited to welcome Tad Friend to Harvard bookstore to discuss his memoir cheerful Money me my family in the last days of wasp splendor. Mr. French is a staff writer for The New Yorker where he writes the letter from California. He previously wrote for Esquire Vogue New York and outside. He is the author of Lost in Mongolia travels in Hollywood and other foreign lands and was called by Steve Martin the finest writer who has never done standup comedy. Working today so Mr. friend is himself a self-proclaimed and certifiable wasp. For those of you unfamiliar with the term wasp stands for white Anglo-Saxon Protestant and for generations they dominated the upper echelons of American society and power. In cheerful money Mr friend offers an insider's guide to this often misunderstood social class and tries to explain his own conflicted relationship with his WASPy heritage. National Book Award winning author Peter Matheson called cheerful money sharp insightful and highly humorous and Susan Cheever author of American Bloomsbury said of the book friend animates a deeply private

aristocratic way of life with detailed moving intimacy. We'll follow his friends talk with a question answer session. We'll end with the book signing right here at this table copies of cheerful money are available right up at the registers We do ask that you purchase your copy before having it signed. And as always I thank those of you who do purchase the book tonight by doing so you're supporting this local independent bookstore and this author series and making it possible for Harvard bookstore to bring great like writers like Ted friend to you so please join me in welcoming him to the podium. Thanks Mike. I think you pretty much covered it actually with description. I was wonder what you meant by certifiable there's two possible meanings to that sort of a wasp. I was writing about my family this is my my my father's side this is actually my father at the age of six weeks. You can really see it but he's a tiny sort of scared looking baby because he's surrounded by his father his father's father and his father's father's mother for generations. Most of them are sort of staring at him as if they've

never seen a baby before. And this is my fathers are the family and I in the opening chapter I kind of try to sketch out the various branches of the family. So I just read that the first chapter is called tomatoes or as we'll see possibly called tomatoes. When I graduated from 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. Did your marvelous background. Robinson Pearson Holton friend was the four branches of my family. I remember scowling at her airy blue script noting the point after the first dash where the compliment turned into a eugenic claim. As my grandparents happen to constitute a wasp compass the way ahead was marked in all directions. I could proceed as a Robinson like primitives family loquacious madcap sometimes unhinged appears unlikely to John's family bristling with brains Houlton like grandma just as

family restless haughty show ponies or a friend like Grampa Ted's family monied clubbable and timid. I believed then that my family was not my fate. I believe 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 sun porch. Though my parents gave me love and learning and all the comforts I believed I could go it alone. My grandparents were distant consolations and as they wheeled across the sky I felt unshadowed by their marriages their affairs their remarriage his or their quarrels on the question of how to pronounce tomato for instance the family was split. On my fathers side the friends in Holden's unselfconsciously said tomato on my mother's The Robinsons were staunch in the angle file tomato camp while the Pearsons on the even more superior view of the tomato was pretentious were ardently pro tomato. At the family beach house along on my great uncle Wilson Pearson would rebuke my mother Robinson in such matters as she asked for a

tomato. Would you like some potatoes with that he'd say. It was unclear why such nuances should matter to me. The deeper history the cultural history filtered down only piecemeal. My father was embarrassed by some of his forebears. I mother blithely assumed everyone knew all about hers. She might mention in passing the lei she'd worn at their wedding lace handed down from mothers to their firstborn daughters for thirteen generations beginning in England with good of Constantine and sixteen twenty nine and continuing through such delightfully named ancestors as let us Beechen Damaris add water. A poem that accompanies the lace reads in part. Guard it dear child as these have done good women pure and true who hand it with their own fair names unblemished down to you that sort of exacting heirloom which my sister to me later were her wedding contributed to a sense that we should hold ourselves apart in readiness. But what for was never declared. The mission was a jigsaw puzzle of watchwords affiliations expectations

furniture clothes habits rituals empties and stories a lacked one key detail. Why three years after my mother died I published a piece about her in The New Yorker in it. I tried to describe her aspirations and disappointments and her search for consolation. What she had taken from her parents and handed on to us and the gifts that she herself had brought to the party. I thought it was a loving portrait. There was also unsparing perhaps even more than I'd intended. Anger can impeach you. The piece rattled my family in ways that slowed the writing of this book yet clarified its true subject. Some of my relatives felt I was ungenerous and some simply wondered whose side are you on. Yet apostasy is in our blood too. Every so often in my family someone writes a candid book or gets knocked up by the wrong guy. Now it was my turn the acronym wasp which Mike was talking about earlier from white Anglo-Saxon Protestant is one many wasps dislike

as it's redundant anglo saxons are perforce white and inexact Elvis Presley was a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant as is Bill Clinton. But nobody thinks of them as wasps. Wasp Eunice is an overlay on human character like the porcelain veneer that protects the biting surface of a damaged tooth. Worse the adjective is pejorative WASPy is reserved for horse faced women tight assed men penny pinchers and acapella groups. I'm too cheap to spring for a new acronym but my family and their friends as wasps were circumscribed by skin tone and religion and by a set of traditions and expectations caste of mind they lived in a floating Ruritania loosely bounded by LLB into the north. The shingle style to the east. Robert Falcon Scott's doomed polar expedition to the south and the limits of Horace Greeley's optimism to the west. That cast of mind is excessively attuned to such question is it how you say tomato.

A word I now find myself pronouncing both ways. Usually at random and always with misgiving. In this and more important respects I seem to become somehow a Mali product of my famously marvelous background. Oh sure I don't belong to any clannish or exclusive clubs. I prefer beer to hard liquor. I'm neither affable nor peevish. The alternating currents of wasp and I love pop culture. And yet until quite recently I had the wasp fridge marmalade wilted scallions out of season grapes seltzer and vodka. Nothing to really eat the was frigid like The Bachelor fridge but wasps load up on dairy including both one and two percent milk moldy cheese expired yogurt and separated sour cream and a top the wasp fridge that peppermint Pepperidge Farm a lot of those fig newtons or salt teens. Some Chewy or salty or otherwise challenging snack. I have a concise and predictable wardrobe and friends even like to claim that I invariably wear the same

oatmeal colored Shetland sweater. Just not this one. I will never experience the pleasures of leather pants or shark's tooth on a thong dangling in my chest hair. I will never experience the pleasures of chest hair. And like the Tin Man I don't articulate my outer upper body in sections and moves on mass or not at all. I politely stand aside no no after you. I have a soft laugh and I rarely even raise my voice so I have an outsized grin and friends take pleasure in trying to elicit it. I am reserved upon first meeting. I used to like being told I was intimidating because it seemed to sanction my verbal jabbing to maintain a perimeter. Making everyone a little easy and easy came naturally. When I characterize a college roommates dancing style as Jimmy Crack Corn he nursed the moon for decades. And a woman I fooled around with in my early twenties told me years later that she had to get a new mattress and headboard after I remarked on her game show bed. I am slow to depend on people because I hate being disappointed. Hate having to withdraw my trust.

All this is often lead people to read me as aloof or smug. I am fiercely but privately emotional. I was embarrassed recently when my wife Amanda found me having put having put the giving tree down while reading to our twins Walker and Addie because I was in tears. I married Amanda strong minded food writer seven years ago and she immediately began to revamp my fridge and some of my other disaster areas. I walk into parties with a confident air and wait to speak to have a point to make or a self-deprecating joke to offer. I can give a handsome wedding toast. I am slow to pitch in on manual labor not particularly handy but I pride myself on the rarely called for ability to carve a watermelon into the shape of a whale. The sprig of parsley makes the spout. I am frugal to the point of cheapness when out to dinner with friends I used to contribute only for the dishes I had ordered. I dislike having to eat quail or crab all that effort and mess for scant reward and aversion Amanda likes to call no sex in public for a long time.

I didn't think of myself as particular competitive for my golfing friends kept assuring me as they pointed out where my helicopter firing had landed. But I was in my belief that you should do something you care about in a half assed way often provokes the charge that I don't want to take part in any activity I can't do well that I fear public ineptitude which is certainly true for karaoke. Despite my standoffishness I'm a good listener and loyal and friends often turn to me for advice. A wasp friend recently remarked that I would have made an imposing country parson. Most of all I'm 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. And because deep into my 30s most of my relationships had the lifespan of a child's balloon. I felt that I was carrying around a brimming bucket of walnut stain that if anyone got too close it would spill all over both of us. So I ended up spending my inheritance and then some on psychoanalysis. I was in trouble but I was nearly impossible for anyone who didn't know me well to tell

and I made it nearly impossible for anyone to know me well. When I was 12 my father looking around the dinner table meaningfully repeated a Biblical quotation a Swarthmore student had repeated reminded him of earlier in the day my father was the president was my college. The quotation was for unto whomsoever much is given of him shall be much required. That lets me out I said. And my parents laughed. My brother and sister and I were expected to appreciate what we've been given and make conspicuous use of it. Wasps are credentialism my father particularly so he thumbnail people by their resumes. A very able guy with a Ph.D. in micro economics from Stanford head of the Asia Society served on the National Security Council and so forth. Yet my parents had also sought in different ways to escape the way of life that it sustained their own achievements. So we received a tricky set of imperatives meet the unspoken standard without thinking about it too

much brooding on uncensored and ancestral benchmarks could suck you into a life on the couch the long parenthesis wasps don't rebel so much as drink sink and drop away. For generations though the three centuries when wasps ran the country my family rose and stayed aloft. After my various forebears came to America in the mid 17th century as weavers or constables or tavern owners it was their descendants who made good. Signing the Declaration of Independence the trembly penned John Morton or leading the Union Army the shilly shally ing George McClellan. The branches of my family tree were bowed with Squires judges ministers senators and Colonial Dames. Yet no one who really wealthy until the turn of the 20th century when the friends made enough from steel coal and banking to become briefly smashingly rich chauffeur rich yet rich. Three hundred fifty million dollars in today's money rich on the whole though we were attendant lowered the seat fillers in historical paintings to look on approvingly as those whose names are taught in school

read a ringing speech or charge a well garrisoned Hill. My great great grandfather Henry Cornelius Robinson was in this way typical and eloquent and energetic mayor of Hartford in the 1870s a man who greeted male friends by gripping their shoulders and crying comrade. A passionate man moved to tears by stirring music. A burly man with the same Atar nose and sideburns that swept into a forked beard worthy of ze top. He was also a man who like to lie in his red sofa after a hard day and have his daughter rub his forehead with a sponge dipped in bay rum. He wrote Christmas carols exult the sons of Morna his clearest as he sees me as a man does clearest morn exult the sounds of man the child is born and he also kept two union flags from the Civil War draped over his pee outside and a huge American flag above them. When you this is Grant died Robinson consoled Hartford citizens with a speech recited from memory. It is a great thing to have lost such a man. It is much greater to have had such a man to lose. He declared he was a child of the people he was a type of the people and the

hearts of the people are keeping sad time to the funeral march of 20000 soldiers. The nation pauses in its activities. The Reaper and the Loom are at rest and even the money changers have locked their vaults. Yet when President Benjamin Harrison asked him to serve as minister to Spain a step toward becoming such a man himself he declined. What leave Hartford in latter years as the money that had buoyed floatation leaked and then floated away. My family like many others tried to caulk the seams in a country built on growth and transformation on the appetite for more. The ambition to preserve things as they were is peculiar to the modern wasp. All we ask is to maintain so success while vital came to be understood not as blazing a trail but as waging a culture of comfort preserving rear guard action. Prep school faculties team with Wasps who majored in English or history as brokerage houses do with Wasps who majored in finance. Wasp serves as the caretakers of tradition in publishing

Foundation's university administration lexicography antiquarian society's Nature Conservancy s and trusts and estates law nearly empty of wasps. However our electric car manufacturer IIS Internet startups and the X-Games. Figures like Henry Cornelius Robinson saw their duty as leading without fanfare. Wasps continued to see this is their role even as they began to follow and even as Shortly after I was born they fell so far behind they lost touch entirely. Their accelerating crack up was like a sonic boom. You heard it only after the Concorde was gone. I now see the charge moments are prized. My earliest memories were always linked to those distant family constellations. When I sat by our kitchen sink in Buffalo my mother touch me lightly in passing like the Holy Spirit. I felt the cold cool million below and the ensuing solitude but couldn't know then that my ancestors and the amassed weight of their expectations had crowded the room to keep Mom intent on her chores.

What her parents thought and felt and did was alive in her and so alive in me. Or mostly it was not everything connects sifting through our overstuffed attics and well-guarded memory banks. I try to fit the pieces together in time hop scotching among decades and mashing up friends and mentors girlfriends and grandparents in search of a larger design. Love enters into it too by being everything. Life is a scavenger hunt run backward as well as forward a race to comprehend. But with wasps the caretakers lack the explanatory stars away and swallow the key. Thanks very much. Anyone questions Mike. You notice regional differences.

Oh you're right. I think mostly the people I'm writing about are sort of northeast wasps but they're you know they're out there in lots of different places and I think you know if you look back at a movie like The Graduate which is writing about basically wasps and Pasadena even though Dustin Hoffman was playing he was quite a wasp so. And in fact the screenplay describes him as a wasp so they don't really necessarily see that on the screen so there really are regional differences I don't get into like the sort of all that subspecies too much because I only really know the one that I come from. So I guess I was yeah there was more I feeling I guess a feeling of metaphorically. That I guess I try make a larger point that you know as a child I think you always think that you can make your own way completely in the world and follow your own compass and in fact the points are pretty much laid out in certain ways as things that

that have the greatest turns out to have the greatest impression on you and kind of guide you are things that no one ever talks about the things that people talk about you can rebel against I don't want to be that. The things that I want take for granted are much harder to kind of deal with because you just there they become part of your DNA almost. And so when I talk about my mom being sort of crowded by her ancestors I was talking about those kinds of expectations and the sort of invisible walkways that you're you sort of have to follow without even knowing that you're doing it. I mean my X family well I haven't heard from everyone I gave the book to my brother and sister and father about a year ago when I finish it and they had a few things they want to change but they were mostly really tiny factual things. And I would say they may have been secretly seething inside because who wouldn't. I think memoirs. You know it's a it's sort of like introducing a taper in your family I mean no one every people is assume the

families you know all the stuff you do and the crazy things people say that's going to remain within the family that's the whole idea of a family is that it's us against everyone else. And so all of a sudden you know here I am the Trojan horse. And but that said my dad he's my immediate family. They were very somewhere between appreciative and forbearing which is about all you can ask. I would say you know I think one of the great things about I mean as I try to say in this chapter of my parents gave me you know lots of things and one of the things they did say is like you can do whatever you want and they actually meant it. And so. I feel like I was allowed to pursue my interest which I want to be reading and writing. You know one of the things I talk about in the book was a sort of poignant fraught moment with my mother when we were having the first of our series of challenging conversations about how I've been raised. When I started therapy I was learning I could actually talk to your parents about these issues.

We were sitting on a beach and I was sort of raising the issue and and my mom to her great credit really tried to grapple with it with me I mean you know and she she was very candid she said you know I wasn't ready to have children. When you came along I you know she didn't talk about she been working until then obviously having me then she stopped working there lots of issues with that. But she was acknowledging she wasn't ready and she said I'm afraid I left you alone a big deal when you were a child which I certainly always felt. But then she brightened and she said but you started reading very early and I are a writer. So. She was a good one for making lemonade out of lemons. So I think it's always tricky because you know I think with there was in it you know there was a feeling like if you came home with a B-plus on a report card my dad would get very gloomy about things and I mean that's a common you know idea that you know you can do whatever you want to but you know if you get really good grades you'll have more options. So it's a tricky thing because I handle me I want to get good grades what

if what's what if that's what I want to do and that is not so. OK I guess. Well we have three year old twins so together they are six. That's taking them in order. Amanda is a technical wasp but she and her siblings are the first people in the family ever gone to college. So we each have a very different kind of cultures and they can actually fix a car and like our practical abilities that we're just mystified by. And and it wasn't important to me and yet I ended up with a technical y so maybe it was I'm not sure how. I write in the book about you know other relationships with people from other backgrounds and why they didn't work. And I like to think it wasn't because they were from other backgrounds but you know I think the evidence might be mixed on that in terms of my kids that's something I I try to try to weave them through the book. They come up a lot because. They're at this point relatively blank slates and so

this is something I think probably all parents struggle with where I'd like them to be as I wrote the book is that I want them to see this is what it was like for me growing up and you can get to know me better and that will be great. Save you five years of therapy at the same time. I don't want them to feel like this heavy impress of that culture and feel like you know they too have to go through these stations of the cross. And yet if they repeat it the entire way that I grew up I will feel hurt. So it's a mixed message and I think that's what parenting is all about you know. Yes he did he wrote a novel which was I guess you would call Romana Clay about growing up in this environment and. And when you know when we have some occasionally frank words about the whole project that I was involved with I would try to remind him that he written a novel that history went off in his generation. So as part of the thing I was writing

about how every so often someone writes a candid book. His his step grandmother actually may not have read the book kept kind of which was very candid about his his father's character based on his father's drinking problems and his mother's fooling around problems and things. But a step grandmother got very brutal about the whole thing and basically told him to leave the house when he had her to come to visit her as soon as he sat down they should leave the house. So yeah. The question is about my writing for The New Yorker where I read the letter from California but I live in Brooklyn and basically how do I manage that and what's And how do I get to do it. I was writing for The New Yorker and the editor I've been writing just sort of by happenstance pieces from Los Angeles and the editor is like why don't you write a letter from Los Angeles and I thought that was too constraining and I said when I wrote a letter from the west coast and then we

compromise I think happily in California because hell fornia is the world's sixth largest economy in and of itself and has its own terrain I think that was a good compromise. And then he said when will you be moving out and I said I will not be moving out. So so I fly out a lot and it's actually got a lot harder with the children because I don't really want to be away from them so it's a little bit of a tricky balance where I try to to really target like a week or 10 days where you just go out and do everything and come back. But people always are you know. I mean it's probably a fair charge that it's the rubric is misleading to us as a letter from California and you know it's written in Brooklyn Heights. But The New Yorker has a long tradition of that letter from Europe is written by someone who lives in Manhattan letter from Washington for years was written by someone who lived in Pelham New York. It's just a bad rubric if you just said you know reports from Port ports or flybys or something it would all work out. Anyone else have any questions or is it. I think the most surprising thing I learned from reading is that I actually could like writing for years.

Writing was a it was a painful arduous process for me. I dreaded it. I just had to like you know pitchfork myself to get myself to sit down and start writing because I didn't like the process of doing that first ugly draft. And I only liked it when I was sort of fixing it up and polishing it later and this. I mean I hesitate to tread too closely upon the cliche you know that this is the book I was born to write or anything but it actually felt like I wanted to write this book. And I wrote it relatively quickly and happily and looked forward to doing it. And and I think that's carried over a bit where I've now feel like writing actually could be if not fun at least an exciting challenge as opposed to a Chinese water torture. The next book I don't have a next book. And it's funny because there's a book party in New York and my dad is saying well now that he's gotten this book out of his system he can write the book that he was meant

to write. So as I thanks. I don't I don't have it I'm going I'm going I'm sitting up here afterward I'd love to have suggestions for people. You know she she would be loath to admit this but I think I've actually had a bad effect on her rather than but I mean I eat better because. But she will now like eat a hamburger and like it and she will also although she would be horrified for me to be saying especially with someone filming it but I'll say it anyway. She will now occasionally have a latte after dinner which is totally forbidden in her world but she will it sink to my level. She kind of does it as if she's like sticking a heroin needle in your eye but she's like that but I think I need to know where you're going with this. I'm just like yeah

you are right or we didn't. You know my mom didn't really use a whole lot of garlic. There were if that if that helps. OK. Maybe on that note. Thanks very much for coming. Thank you.