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When Liz Perle was a little girl, her grandmother brought her into her room and produced a reticule from deep within a drawer. Stuffing a folded $20 bill into the misshapen little purse, she explained that it was the beginning of Liz's private stash. "Every woman needs money of her own that her husband never knows about."
The same grandmother also stressed that polite society never discussed money. Lucky for us that Liz Perle ignored that taboo to write this book, whose subtitle is "Women, Emotions, and Cash." The book is a memoir to the extent that we learn the life experiences that brought Perle to the point where she was forced to explore her own fears and emotional connections to money. But it is also the result of interviews with over 200 women of all ages and incomes around the country, and their stories lend an added weight of authority.
MONEY, A MEMOIR is not a self-help or fix-it book. It's more of a "face-it" book, as we accompany the author on a plane back from Shanghai with her four-year-old son, reluctant to count the wad of bills her soon-to-be ex-husband gave her as she left him at the airport. As she puts it, "There's nothing like losing just about everything to lay bare what's important." Thus began the process of examining her emotional relationship to and assumptions about money.
She points out some sobering facts about our country: that more than half of all retired women live in poverty. That more women will file for bankruptcy this year than will graduate from college, suffer a heart attack, or be diagnosed with cancer. She talks of the emotional middle class, those who rely on money to recreate safety and surety of the mythic middle class. "We marched past the simple desire for comfort to a need for luxury." We want nice things but we don't want to think of ourselves as materialistic. As long as we experience purchases as necessities, we can escape that nasty label. And there are plenty of advertisements and catalogs to convince us that we deserve only the highest thread count in our sheets. No wonder the average credit card debt in the United States is $8,000.
Several chapters explore money as a symbol of power in relationships and the not-so-pretty dances we do to avoid money conflicts. Even if we do have our own jobs and our own money, what happens when we get laid off? The author admits that between jobs she resorted to filching $20 bills from her husband's wallet --- so she could buy him a worthy present! We may not have gone that far, but how many of us have knocked a few dollars off the cost of that leather jacket when (if!) we tell our husbands?
Throughout the book, Perle maintains a warm, honest, direct tone that keeps us reading about this sometimes uncomfortable topic. No finger wagging here --- just material, both expert and anecdotal, that helps us understand our own emotional attachments to cash. "Perhaps that way we can move closer to liberating ourselves from the fears and fantasies that keep us from asking to be paid what a job is worth, or from saving for our retirement, or that leave us mired in intractable debt." So go ahead, buy this book. It's money well spent.
--- Reviewed by Eileen Zimmerman Nicol
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