Cheerful Money: Me, My Family, and the Last Days of Wasp Splendor
About this audiobook
Tad Friend’s family is nothing if not illustrious: his father was president of Swarthmore College, and at a Smith college poetry contest judged by W. H. Auden, his mother came in second—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, Friend 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 Money is a captivating examination of a cultural crack-up and a man trying to escape its wreckage.
About the author
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.
William Dufris began his audio career in London and has acted on stage and television in the US, the UK, and Germany. He is the original voice of Bob the Builder, and now produces, directs, acts and engineers for his own company. He has been nominated for nine Audies, won twenty-one Earphones Awards, and is one of AudioFile's Best Voices at the End of the Century, as well as one of the Best Voices of the Year 2008 and 2009.
