Jenny Offill - Money Changes Everything: Twenty-Two Writers Tackle the Last Taboo with Tales of Sudden Windfalls, Staggering Debts, and Other Surprising Turns of Fortune

Foreword

Jenny Offill and Elissa Schappell

Americans live in a culture of confession. We talk freely about whom weve slept with, what were addicted to, how crazy our families are, and why we take a rainbow of antidepressants. But even in this tell-all age, there is one topic that remains decidedly taboo.

Ask a friend how she spends her time in the bedroom and chances are youll get a breezy answer about tantric games or the perils of certain sex toys; ask her how she spends her money and youre likely to be met with an awkward silence. Its one thing to confide your latest romantic disaster or family drama to a friend, quite another to let her see your disgraceful credit report. In fact, 47 percent of Americans say theyd rather disclose their weight or age than the amount of money in their bank account.

Its no surprise. Who wants to talk about a spouse who blows the family nest egg on the ponies or a divorce settlement that has you digging in the couch for the kids lunch money? Who wants to confess that they hide their credit card bills or that theyre crying poor even though they never need to work another day in their life? Who wants to come clean about the fact that money has made them do things theyre ashamed of?

Such money stories are hard to tell because they feel incredibly revealing. To shine a light on how much we make, how much we spend, how much we owe, and how much weve got secretly socked away is to give others a potent glimpse into the values we live by. Because of this, admitting to money troubles can often feel like admitting to a weakness of character. To find yourself broke is to face an ever-widening spiral of self-recrimination. If only I hadnt bought that leather coat or taken that vacation, you think. If only Id worked harder, or planned betterIf only I wasnt so careless, so lazy, so weak

We may know logically that our checking account balance is not a true indicator of our worth, but an ATM receipt that deems us insufficient can still register like a character judgment. Given the emotional stakes, its no wonder most of us clam up when it comes to discussing money woes. It can be humbling to admit that such an important part of life has slipped out of our control.

This desire to seem prosperous even when one is barely getting by leads many Americans to completely ignore the reality of their financial situations. Instead, we try to live up to the champagne and caviar celebrity culture that is endlessly touted on television and in magazines, leasing fancy cars and jetting off on lavish vacations. And since we live in the land of mega-malls, no-money-down credit, and twenty-four-hour ATMs, its easier than ever to get in over our heads.

Economists report that middle-class families are now carrying record levels of credit card debt, going without health insurance, and filing for bankruptcy at several times the rate of the early 1980s. Turns out those McMansions and shiny SUVs have us mortgaged up to our eyeballs, but until the wolf is truly at the door, you wont find many of us admitting it.

Some of us are quietly shaking in our boots, though. Debt is a legacy that gets passed down through families, and even those of us who arent in the red yet worry that we may inherit our parents pathologies about money. Jonathan Dee describes how incurring a huge debt he thought would break up his relationship cast him back to the final days of his parents crumbling marriage. The real agent of decay in our lives was always, and unmistakably, money. It did the one thing it knew how to doit ran outand with it, gradually, went our ability to stand being around one another.

Money frays the family ties of the rich, too, especially when each subsequent generation finds theres a little less of it. The shame of having to admit to newly straitened circumstances can be unbearable for families such as Ruth Konigsbergs who continue to play at being rich long after the money is gone. It takes the shock of having to auction off the familys antiques at Sothebys to finally bring home to her how far they have fallen.

Conversely, in this topsy-turvy world, deceit about money can take the form of those with money passing for poor, pretending to be worse off than they really are. For the slumming artist who brags about his fifth-floor walk-up and ramen noodle dinners, the fear of being outed can be just as strong as it is for those whose finances truly are a mess.

Some attempt to mask their solvency in order not to seem like a dilettante or a trust fund baby. Claire Dederer, whose grandfather built her familys fortune on fur, kept the stash her generous father gave her a secret (until now). Here, she writes of struggling with warring feelings of entitlement to the money and resentment about the sense of inauthenticity it provokes. What does it mean, she wonders, when your financial worth is unmoored from your actual achievement?

In our closemouthed society, there are a few exceptions to this dont ask, dont tell approach. It is still de rigueur for artistic types to wear their poverty like a badge of pride or to one-up each other with tales of the outlandish jobs theyve done for money. In Dirty Work, Lydia Millet tells how she left her feminist ideals at the door and took a job editing smut at Hustler magazine just out of college. And Brett Martin exposes himself as the least successful drug dealer Northampton, Massachusetts, has ever seen.

Yet in some ways, the biggest surprise when it comes to Americans reticence about money is that we dont even share our tales of good fortune with one another. This may be because our gain is often anothers loss. In the case of the humorist Henry Alford, the gain was scooping up an incredible bit of Manhattan real estate for a song, the loss, well, heres the first line of the essay: Ive never killed anyone before. But I once felt like I had.