A memoir in which memoir New Yorker staff writer Tad Friend reflects on the pressures of middle age, exploring his relationship with his dying father as he raises two children of his own.
There are, to adapt the saying, two kinds of people: those who write memoirs and those who read them...One can be forgiven for feeling that the first group easily outnumbers the second, which is a pity if that means the reader might skip this book...The author is incapable of writing a bad sentence (trying to connect with his dad 'always felt like ice fishing,' and their kids growing up showed that 'we were racing toward that moment in their trajectory when our role, as booster rockets, is to fall burning back to earth'), and his wit saves many a moment in his dealings with others....Until, of course, it doesn’t, and Friend chronicles his heartbreaking stupidity and his efforts to re-invent himself into a less selfish, more caring person with a painful clarity that leaves the reader precariously hopeful...It is unlikely you will read a finer memoir this year.
Now in his mid-50s, 'sliding down the neck of the hourglass,' veteran New Yorker staff writer Friend updates his memoir Cheerful Money by once again examining his childhood and young adulthood, education and aspirations, and reflecting, in intimate detail, on his marriage to food writer Amanda Hesser and parenthood to twins...Complicating the puzzle was his discovery, after his father’s death in 2019, of a trove of letters, journals, ruminations, and verses, including a file titled 'Annals of Carnality 1948-58,' which revealed someone far different from the emotionally distant father who, Friend writes, 'hugged me until I was about seven. Then he stopped'...The man who emerged from these pieces was 'curious, generous, errant, sensitive, bighearted'...Mostly engaging, the narrative at times seems self-serving despite the author’s efforts at candor...A complicated family saga.
A son's recollection of his father reveal much about himself in this knotty yet moving memoir...New Yorker scribe Friend profiles his father Theodore 'Day' Friend, a historian, novelist, and onetime president of Swarthmore College, always imposing and increasingly cantankerous with age...Friend draws out multigenerational resonances in his boyhood relationship with Day and his relationships with his own young children; in their love of playing squash, which measured their vitality and decline; in their separate quests to develop as writers; and in the marital strains caused by Day’s infidelities and Friend’s own sporadic unfaithfulness to his wife...Writing in wry and inquisitive prose, Friend crafts vibrant portraits of his relatives and evokes intimate family dynamics...Out of this comes a luminous narrative of love, transgression, and forgiveness, and of the ties that bind despite chafing.
