![]() ![]() In 2001, he published "Lost in Mongolia: Travels in Hollywood and Other Foreign Lands", a collection of his articles. ![]() His work there includes the magazine's "Letter from California". He was educated at The Shipley School and Harvard University.įriend was a contributing editor at various publications, including Esquire, prior to becoming a staff writer at The New Yorker in 1998. Theodore Porter "Tad" Friend (born September 25, 1962) is a staff writer for The New Yorker who writes the magazine's "Letter from California".īorn in Buffalo, New York, Friend was raised there and in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, where his father, Theodore Friend, was president of Swarthmore College. JSTOR ( December 2020) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message).Contentious material about living persons that is unsourced or poorly sourced must be removed immediately from the article and its talk page, especially if potentially libelous. On my father’s side, the Friends and Holtons unselfconsciously said “tomayto.” On my mother’s, the Robinsons were staunchly in the Anglophile “tomahto” camp, while the Piersons, on the even more superior view that “tomahto” was pretentious, were ardently pro-“tomayto.” At the family beach house on Long Island, my great-uncle Wilson Pierson would rebuke my mother, a Robinson in such matters, if she asked for a “tomahto.” “Would you like some potahtoes with that?” he’d say.Ĭhapter 1 excerpt from CHEERFUL MONEY: Me, My Family, and the Last Days of Wasp Splendor by Tad Friend (Little, Brown and Company, hardcover, also available in e-book pub date: 9/21/09).This biography of a living person needs additional citations for verification. On the question of how to pronounce “tomato,” for instance, the family was split. My grandparents were distant constellations, and as they wheeled across the sky I felt unshadowed by their marriages, their affairs, their remarriages, or their quarrels. 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. 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? ![]()
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