Cheerful Money

August 24, 2009
“Grievances in my family are like underground coal fires,” Friend confides, “hard to detect and nearly impossible to extinguish.” But a remembrance of his mother that appeared in the New Yorker
brought many of those tensions to the surface; shortly afterward, his father accused him of being “a prisoner of Freudianism” for dwelling on the theme of emotional distance. Nevertheless, Friend pushes forward, combining family history and memoir as he recounts his youthful efforts to prove “my family was not my fate” and break away from the “cast of mind” circumscribed by his WASP upbringing—the firm handshakes, the summer homes, the university clubs. Friend knows exactly how privileged he is and recognizes that readers won't easily feel sorry for someone who can spend more than $160,000 on therapy. (“My birthright in wherewithal,” he quips, “seemed to me almost perfectly balanced by my birthright in repression.”) Instead of asking for sympathy, he works at showing how his efforts at emotional integration have begun to pay off, including the relationship with his own wife and children, in a story of cross-generational frustration and reconciliation that transcends class boundaries. 8 pages of b&w photo.

July 1, 2009
A New Yorker staff writer struggles to strike a prepossessing pose in a populous family photograph.

Fully aware that his is a complicated story, Friend (Lost in Mongolia: Travels in Hollywood and Other Foreign Lands, 2001), provides a two-page family tree that rivals the Tudors' in complexity. The chart is a reader's dear friend, though, for it helps clarify quick allusions to"Timmie Robinson" and numerous others who occasionally pop up in the thick narrative, which interweaves accounts of his relatives' lives with ruminations on his childhood, schooling, lovers, career, travel, marriage, parenthood, privilege and psychotherapy. Friend often felt unloved and unloving, he writes, adding that he expended most of a $160,000 inheritance on 13 years of psychotherapy. He illuminates that period a bit in"Reconstruction," a chapter that also features accounts of his mother's obsessive remodeling of a house. We learn that Friend was an award-winning high-school student and a Harvard graduate who took home"a raft of prizes" at commencement. His father was president of Swarthmore College, his mother an aspiring poet and youthful rival of Sylvia Plath. The author bounced from girlfriend to girlfriend before finding his true love and current wife. Friend knows he's enjoyed some breaks in life—family summer homes in desirable places, notable relatives, money worries rather than poverty—and he's suitably ambivalent about it, waxing ironic and sometimes even waspish about the WASPy world of his nativity. He deals effectively with his mother's terminal struggles with cancer and with his father's emotional reserve. He tells us little about his writing—mostly that other people think it's wonderful—but notes his initial difficulty at the New Yorker crafting"long pieces that fit together like jigsaw puzzles."

Indeed, Friend's memoir is mostly in pieces that could use further assemblage.

(COPYRIGHT (2009) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

September 1, 2009
The Friend family may not have occupied the highest seats of power, but they managed to carve out a comfortable existence for themselves. In this memoir of growing up in a privileged existence, Tad Friend realized early on that the familys fortunes were in decided decline as both economic reality and evolving society took their toll. Outstanding among the books rich cast of characters, Tads mother, Elizabeth, graduated from Smith and was an accomplished poet. His historian father was a college president, so the familys dinner table never lacked for lively conversation. As if to disguise the familys reluctance to deal with substantive issues, they obsessed on such trivialities as proper pronunciation and socially acceptable euphemism. Yet the familys real center often seemed to be the Irish Catholic maid, Baba, who presided over the upbringing and management of several generations. Photographs of the family over the decades help guide readers.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)