Worst for Friend, however, was the unintended legacy passed along by his parents. They summered in the most exclusive preserve of the Hamptons, but drove there in a station wagon with a rusted-out bottom.
So although Friend grew up surrounded by gifted and privileged people, attending the best schools and immersed in tasteful objects and pursuits, his was a world of “chipped dishes and bitten nails underlying insouciance.” His family was wealthy yet ever conscious of money problems. he first generation earns the money, the second begins its dispersal. But one of the lessons a WASP learns early in life, Friend explains, is that “money doesn’t multiply it divides. “Briefly,” he writes, they were “smashingly” rich. This memoir about what it was actually like to grow up in the inner circles of decaying White Anglo-Saxon Protestant-dom may cause many readers to gratefully embrace even their suburban tract homes and oddly ethnic last names.įriend is a New Yorker correspondent and, by his own description, the offspring of “a Wasp compass.” When he graduated from prep school, his grandmother’s method of congratulating him was to tell him that she expected “nothing less due to your marvelous background – Robinson, Pierson, Holton, Friend!” Even then, Friend recalls understanding that, rather than a compliment, this was “a eugenic claim.”įriend’s forebears came to America from England in the mid-1600s and then – on both sides of the family – massively enriched themselves on steel, coal, and banking in the early 20th century.
Try picking up Cheerful Money: Me, My Family, and the Last Days of Wasp Splendor by Tad Friend. (And to be honest, which of us hasn’t felt its sting at least occasionally? After all, Ralph Lauren has made a fortune marketing to such feelings.)īut for those who yearn, there’s now a remedy. If you’ve ever felt a sudden, acute desire to casually drape a Shetland sweater over your shoulders even as you complain – just a bit wearily – that you must head out to join old prep school friends at your inherited summer mansion, then you’ve probably experienced WASP envy.
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