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Tad Friend - In the Early Times: A Life Reframed

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Tad Friend In the Early Times: A Life Reframed
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In the Early Times: A Life Reframed: summary, description and annotation

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In this dazzling (John Irving) memoir, acclaimed 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.
How often does a memoir build to a stomach-churning, I-cant-breathe climax in its final pages? . . . Brilliant, intensely moving.William Finnegan, Pulitzer Prizewinning author of Barbarian Days

ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New Yorker
Almost everyone yearns to know their parents more thoroughly before they die, to solve some of those lifelong mysteries. Maybe, just maybe, those answers will help you live your own life. But life doesnt stop to wait. In his fifties, New Yorker writer Tad Friend is grappling with being a husband and a father as he tries to grasp who he is as a son. Torn between two families, he careens between two stages in life. On some days he feels vigorous, on the brink of greatness when he plays tournament squash. On others, he feels distinctly weary, troubled by his distance from millennial sensibilities or by his own face in the mirror, by a grimace thats so like his fathers.
His father, an erudite historian and the former president of Swarthmore College, has long been gregarious and charming with strangers yet cerebral with his children. Tad writes that trying to reach him always felt like ice fishing. Yet now Tads father, known to his family as Day, seems concerned chiefly with the flavor of ice cream in his bowl and, when pushed, interested only in reconsidering his view of Franklin Roosevelt.
Then Tad finds his fathers journal, a trove of passionate confessions that reveals a man entirely different from the exasperatingly logical father Day was so determined to be. It turns out that Tad has been self-destructing in the same way Day hasa secret each has kept from everyone, even themselves. These discoveries make Tad reconsider his own role, as a father, as a husband, and as a son. But is it too late for both of them?
Witty, searching, and profound, In the Early Times is an enduring meditation on the shifting tides of memory and the unsteady pillars on which every family rests.

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Copyright 2022 by Tad Friend All rights reserved Published in the United - photo 1
Copyright 2022 by Tad Friend All rights reserved Published in the United - photo 2

Copyright 2022 by Tad Friend

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Crown, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

Crown and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

Portions of this book appeared, in different form, in The New Yorker.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to Grove/Atlantic, Inc. and The Wylie Agency LLC for permission to reprint Late Fragment from A New Path to the Waterfall by Raymond Carver. Copyright 1989 by the Estate of Raymond Carver. Copyright 1989, 2000 by Tess Gallagher. Reprinted by permission of Grove/Atlantic and The Wylie Agency LLC.

Excerpt of The Hurley Player from More Songs from Leinster by Winifred M. Letts, originally published in Great Britain by John Murray, a division of Hachette UK, London, in 1926.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Friend, Tad, author.

Title: In the early times / by Tad Friend.

Description: First edition. | New York : Crown, [2022]

Identifiers: LCCN 2021053378 (print) | LCCN 2021053379 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593137352 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780593137369 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Friend, Tad. | Friend, TadFamily. | Friend, TheodoreLast years. | Father and son. | Friend family. | WASPs (Persons)Biography.

Classification: LCC CT275.F715 A3 2022 (print) | LCC CT275.F715 (ebook) | DDC 929.20973dc23/eng/20211202

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021053378

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021053379

Ebook ISBN9780593137369

crownpublishing.com

Most photos in the book courtesy of Amanda Hesser and Tad Friend. Additional photos by Margaret Baba Dunn ().

Cover design: Christopher Brand

Cover photographs: Dorie Friend on his sunporch in Buffalo, 1972 (courtesy of the Estate of Anneliese Garver); Walker, Tad, and Addison Friend in Brooklyn Heights, 2013 (courtesy of Amanda Hesser)

ep_prh_6.0_139902021_c0_r0

Contents
Authors Note

I have changed the names of Melanie, Phyllis, Martha, and those in the Group, including Paul Klein.

Hunger Strangers often told me how wonderful my father was Wait my father - photo 3
Hunger

Strangers often told me how wonderful my father was. Wait, my father? Id think. They met a different man, the handsome polymath with the much-stamped passport. The earnest charmer. At conference dinners, hed linger over the Sauternes to draw out his tablemates knowledge of Persian poetry; once, with a Korean man who spoke almost no English, he was able to convey baseballs arcane balk rule using only pantomime. His pockets were always full of business cards inscribed with pleas to keep in touch, as if he were a human Wailing Wall.

Theodore Wood Friend III was Dorie to his contemporaries and Day to his children, from my first tries at Daddy. (Were one of those Wasp families where baby names stick for life.) A believer in letters to the editor and global rapport, he drove four hundred miles to witness Martin Luther Kings I Have a Dream speech, won the Bancroft Prize for his history of the Philippines three years later, and became president of Swarthmore College, in 1973, at forty-two. By then, he was fluent in the histories of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, China, Japan, Korea, and all of Southeast Asia, as well as of American foreign relations. He possessed a resonant baritone and a self-deprecating manner, and hopes were high.

The middle yearsmiddling. Nudged out at Swarthmore, he sought a spot on Reagans National Security Council, hoping for a rise to the cabinet from there. After being passed over, he ran the Eisenhower Exchange Fellowship. EEF brought foreign go-getters to the United States to exchange ideasand, at Day's urging, sent Americans overseas for the same purpose. Like America, he had a missionary temperament, and his sweeping doctrines applied even to the three of us children, the smallest of tribes.

After twelve years at EEF he stepped down, at sixty-five, to take care of our mother, Elizabeth. If Day was a gravel truck juddering off to mend the broken world, Mom was a coupe cornering at speed. At his retirement dinner, where she wore an auburn wig after her chemo, we all had our photo taken with two of the foundations chairmen: Gerald Ford and George H. W. Bush. When the photographer pointed out that Moms hand was obscuring Bushs thigh, Bush remarked, roguishly, Leave it, Elizabeth, it feels good where it is.

That kind of photo costs more, George, she shot back. Days guffaw made everyone except Jerry Ford crack up, and that photo was the keeper.


One August afternoon in 2018, after lunch and before Days nap, my younger sister, Timmie, and I sat down with him in his living room to ask about his life. It felt like our last chance to understand him; he was nearly eighty-six and his once-lush conversation was as clenched as winter wheat. He clearly mistrusted our agenda. The way he sat in his blue armchairchin low, lips tight, gray hair batwinging from his enormous headcalled to mind a nineteenth-century caricature: Boss Tweed astride his empire; the cantankerous Tories.

We began gently, at the beginning, which was probably a mistake, as he hated his Pittsburgh boyhood. Being raised by old-school Wasps was like being raised by a minibar. Timmie asked, How would your parents have described you?

They would have described me as a baby. And then they would have described me as a boy. Timmie glanced over: Uh-oh. He was just checking the box: I owe my children this courtesy. I was of like mind, a paramedic filling out the forms: Did you take every possible measure? Id suppressed my expectations for so long it felt like a form of filial piety. But Timmie still hoped he might finally confess that he loved us more deeply than, for secret reasons, he could ever reveal.

He closed his eyes and said, Im sort of hungry for ice cream.

You had some a short while ago, she said.

I did?

Right after lunch.

He frowned. Day loved sweets. In college, he got fired from a summer job for filling doughnuts with too much jelly. When we lived in Manila, in 1967, he spent two days in a hospital, as Mom noted in a doleful letter home, under observation foryou wont believe itchewing up and swallowing a Christmas tree ball! We had a rather elaborate cake in the shape of a dragon and the eyes were glass balls. Dorie thought they were candy and ate one. Two years later, Day wrote Mom from Amsterdam to say, Drinking young gin (tough) rather than lemon gin (a little sweet) because I want the waiter to realize I am TOUGH . Of course, you realize, my lovely, that I am at least a little sweet. I like a lot of brown sugar on my cereal and a lot of white sugar in my tea and a lot of sympathy in my boyish disconsolations.

He was prey to darker desires, too, but he hid those better. Timmie tried again: If somebody wrote your parents and said, Tell us about your son, whats he like? what would they have said?

Nobody did that. His laugh was a rueful bark. Nobody cared.

So no one cared about you when you were young?

Well, I cared about myself. He laughed again, more softly. But, no. He turned his reading lamp to glare the bulb at us. You go to the station to file a missing person report, and suddenly youre the suspect.

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