It truly takes a WASP to believe that WASPS are a dying breed. (No, this is not the same thing as when the bees died because of cell phones.) The author is a WASP, and the book is about how the WASPs are a dying breed. This book was alternately entertaining and bewildering. I'm glad he wrote the book, I'm glad that I don't have anything to do with his world, and I am so thankful to have been raised in California. I loved the meandering pace, and there is a great payback at the end of the book when he marries Amanda H. Friend's own story is interwoven, not always chronologically, with his family's and the chapters are grouped around a name or phrase that takes on resonance as the chapter progresses. It's beautifully written, and the structure of the narrative is fluid. Reading this book made me understand and then ask myself, "Who cares?" When I got to Smith I just couldn't understand the culture and why traditions there mattered to people and how they knew what to do. I'm glad that I did read it because it explained to me exactly why I hated going to college in Massachusetts so much. I read it because I have a big girlcrush on Amanda Hesser, the NY Times food writer and founder of Food 52 web community, and Tad Friend's wife. But also clearly a loving family as well. A lot of what Friend characterizes as "Wasp" is just a sad family dynamic. I liked so much of this book, and then I thought "Big whoop" about a lot of it. It's interesting that so many of the goodreads reviews about Cheerful Money are ambivalent.
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