|
|
Executive Times |
|||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
2006 Book Reviews |
|||
|
|
Money: A
Memoir by Liz Perle |
|||
|
Rating: |
*** |
|||
|
|
(Recommended) |
|||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
Click on
title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
|||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
Wealth There’s a wealth of insight for readers
in Liz Perle’s new book, Money: A
Memoir. For female readers, Perle articulates
attitudes that some women may have about money, but may have trouble
describing. For male readers, Perle provides some
understanding that may elude men about why some women have such strong
feelings about money matters. Here’s an excerpt, from the beginning of
Chapter 2, “The Emotional Middle Class,” pp. 43-49: The first time I
consciously acknowledged that my relationship with money had more than a few
emotional kinks in it was on a September morning in
1994. 1 was loitering in bed enjoying one of the few side benefits of having
been laid off from my job. I could hear the water running in the next room;
my then husband was shaving. As soon as I figured the coast was clear, I
slipped out of bed and tiptoed over to the bureau, where his wallet was
sitting on top. I stealthily slid a $20 bill out of his billfold and walked
to my closet, where I quickly stuffed it into the toe of my sneaker.
Instantly horrified, I recognized the cringing, shameful feeling as the same
one I used to get in junior high when I would pinch a few bucks from my dad.
But that didn’t stop me from repeating my petty theft—until I amassed close
to $400. My money fears were so powerful that they plowed right past all my
moral stop signs. I had been out of work for
long enough that I’d begun to panic about what the future held. My marriage
wasn’t in the greatest shape, and with each swipe of the credit card, I felt
more deeply dug into emotional debt to my husband, who had complex feelings
of his own about suddenly being cast in the role of sole provider. The week
before, he’d made a crack about the size and scope of the Visa bill, causing
me to go on an immediate and determined money-starvation diet. It lasted four days. Up to that point, I had
always prided myself on the fact that I was a woman who didn’t care about
money or material possessions. I had congratulated myself on my superior
resistance to the call of the designer bag and the shoe-of-the-moment club.
The only problem was, that superiority turned out to
be a total fiction. I did care about money. Very deeply, I discovered. But
I’d disguised that truth by spending in ways that looked selfless: making a
beautiful home, buying presents for family and friends, and entertaining. I
had passed many hours discussing with my friends the problem of balancing
work and family, where I usually staked out the high moral ground of
advocating for having fewer possessions, working fewer hours, and spending
more time with family. That philosophy was fine
except that it quickly went out the window the moment I lacked the cash to do
what I wanted. In this case, it was to buy my husband a fancy birthday
present, a painting of my husband, my son, and me happily picking apples in
an orchard on a fall day. I wanted to give him the image of the marriage I
wanted to have— make it concrete, put it on the wall for everyone—well,
mostly him—to see. For this, I stole his
twenties. As soon as I went back to
work and had an income again, I pushed the specifics of this humiliating
episode into the shady corner of my mind I reserve for the memories that make
me really uncomfortable. I happily focused on the demands of my new job,
serene in the knowledge that I could go to the cash machine and withdraw
money for groceries and expenses and not feel guilty about freeloading off
my husband. I don’t know what happened
to the painting. When my husband and I separated, it got crated up and sent
away with half our possessions. But I do know that I ultimately held on to
something of tremendous value, even if it took a few years for the importance
of it to sink in. That incident showed me that when it came to money, I’d
been kidding myself. It mattered much more to me than I was willing to admit.
As long as I earned a decent salary, I hadn’t needed to look at what it meant
to me. I hadn’t had to stop and think deeply about it. Either there was
enough, or there wasn’t. But the real nature of my relationship with money had—if only
momentarily—become unpleasantly clear. Sure, I needed it, but this
larcenous episode wasn’t caused by a budget deficit. My hungry theft came
from a much deeper and more conflicted place—a tangled dependency of safety
and love and cash—that I wasn’t remotely interested in facing. I had become
accustomed to and defined by a lifestyle that I was clearly willing to do
just about anything to maintain—even at the expense of my principles. When had this happened?
When had I come to depend on things to
define and support me? Growing up, as I did, in a small town at the outer
edges of commuter land, I didn’t think that money or things were all that
important. In fact, I didn’t really focus on money at all. It was simply
there. We weren’t rich. We weren’t poor. In this 1950S neighborhood, we were
all the “Joneses,” and everyone more or less kept pace with one another. The
Bates kids, the Reynolds, Nobles, and Calendars—we rode sherbet-colored bikes
with tassels trailing from the handgrips. We begged for Barbie dream houses
for our birthdays and sang in the Christmas pageant with the real, live
sheep every year whether or not we were Christian. We progressed in lockstep;
when the Like my friends, I went to
a decent public school, where I was encouraged to do well, attend college,
and go as far as my talents and brains and hard work could take me. In this, I
was no different from many Americans. Didn’t the American dream make us
affluent with expectations, opportunities, and promises, if not always with
cash? We felt we were given a cultural promise: that if we worked hard, we
could have the lives of our dreams. With this expectation came a strange
sense of entitlement: It was our right to pursue life, liberty, and happiness
and—while we were at it—a promised land of comfort and surety. And what
better way to purchase those things than with money? “We have definitely
monetized the American dream,” says Juliet Schor.
“Certainly, you have an equation in society that money equals happiness, that
it equals security, that it equals success—and that’s connected to happiness.
Freedom. The American dream found
its muse in the latter half of the twentieth century’s economic middle class.
In the 196os and 197os, we elevated it—with the help of a voracious mass
media—to an almost iconic level. In the flush of the postwar economy,
suddenly more people could afford more things than ever before. Our
fantasies, our possibilities (and our measure of outward success) were
displayed in front of us in glossy ads and on television. We made 2.7 children, a car in the garage, and a
mortgage more than a goal; we uplifted it to a moral ideal. We exported the
middle-class poster children, the Leave
It to Beaver Cleaver family and Mary Tyler Moore’s Laura Petrie, to
countries around the world as the calling card of the land of opportunity. We
wanted everyone to see the picture of stability and material comfort that represented
the achievements of a generation who fought a world war and had given their
children something to show for it. But by the time their
children, the much ballyhooed baby boomers, arrived to claim their piece of
this paradise as adults, the middle class had changed. Not the dream but the
reality. Working with that same drive that provided our parents their
passports to stability and comfort, we pushed for more. In the revolution of
rising expectations, what our parents provided no longer seemed like
“enough.” Middle class stopped being a synonym for security. Instead it signified
a perilous portal, on one side of which lurked financial difficulty and on
the other an Oz of glimmering wealth. Being middle class now meant living
simultaneously with the fear of falling out of it and the dissatisfaction of
not being wealthier. “There is no middle class
in this country anymore,” Barbara, a trim woman in her early sixties, tells
me as we walk through “This safety has just gone.
It’s just disappeared. On every block in my neighborhood, you can buy $300 or
$400 ‘dry-clean-only’ handmade baby snowsuits. This is the way people live.
My son and his wife were looking for baby strollers last weekend, and there’s
an $800 stroller out there.” Barbara shakes her head. She knows they can
afford these things since they both work and are
making good salaries, but this no longer sounds like middle class to her.
It’s something else. It’s almost the opposite of safety since it’s mostly
about consuming. We spend to feel safe, but in the spending, we chip away at
the ground beneath our feet. We want to make “enough” to live the life we
want, but each time we approach “enough,” it moves a few acquisitions farther
out. The increased use of the memoir genre
has led to a wide range of topics covered. I approached this book with low
expectations, but found more interest than I imagined. Money can become
fodder for conflict in many relationships. The insights in this book for men
on how woman can feel differently about money issues will be helpful. For
women, Money:
A Memoir will likely resonate with some feelings that may or may not have
been expressed. In either case, there’s increased understanding to be found
on these pages. Steve Hopkins,
April 24, 2006 |
|||
|
|
|
|||
|
Go to Executive Times
Archives |
||||
|
|
||||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the May 2006
issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/Money
A Memoir.htm For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
|||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
|
|||
