Tad friend email address12/28/2023 ![]() I was keeping them from everyone, including at times myself.” What I said to this person was, “It wasn't like I was keeping my secrets from you. One person who was close to me felt like, “Oh, I thought I knew you well, and I'm disappointed that I didn't,” but I think we've worked through that. Has there been any fallout from friends or family who have read early copies of the book? If you want to see the person that I actually am, read the book. That will in the end be great, but in the short run that sometimes leads to uncertainty or a sense that I've disappointed people or that I wasn't the person I said I was - and that is true. A lot of people, including friends who read it, sort of thought they knew me and now think, Ooh, you're different than you thought. People sometimes have curious responses to candor. I'm a little nervous as one would be with any book, but I'm even more just because, as you said, it’s a pretty candid book. ![]() But thanks to my wonderful wife, who I think is the hero of the story, we’re in a good place. The process of writing the book was much more complicated than I expected and it took me to some difficult, hard, grueling, horrible places where I didn't expect to go. You talk about your dad, your mortality, your marriage, your kids. Here, Friend, 59, talks about fatherhood, coming to terms with the complicated truth of his dad, working through his mistakes, and whether or not we're ever free of our parents' influence. Friend’s vulnerability - good and bad - provides both a warning and serves as an inspiration for fathers of all ages. “And then in the course of writing the book and making discoveries about him and making discoveries about myself, I realized actually, No, there are huge commonalities between us.”Īs Friend writes, the weightiest “hand-me-downs are habits of mind.” There’s no happy ending, just work, including reconsidering his father beyond the superficial and casting off the weight of the past. “I think at a certain point I decided I wrote him off and thought, I'm gonna be different and better and smarter and more emotional than he was,” Friend told Fatherly in early May. Friend had spent a lifetime distancing himself from his father’s tendencies only to find that he embodied them. “Because if she really knew me, she’d realize she’d made a mistake.”Ī child doesn’t receive a handbook for their dad, Friend says. “I wasn’t averse to committing to her completely, I was averse to committing to her completely at the price of being misunderstood,” Friend writes. Then Friend’s wife Amanda discovered his own lengthy history of infidelity. Then Friend discovered a collection of his father’s letters and correspondences that revealed several truths, including that he cheated on his mother. Firmly entrenched in middle-age, he’s a nationally ranked squash player.īut it’s a facade that couldn’t withstand the rigors of life.ĭay, as his father liked to be known, died after Friend turned in his first draft of the book. His family comes out of a magazine shoot, complete with a daughter who wears cat ears and a wife who’s an entrepreneurial dynamo. On the surface, Friend, 59, has an enviable one. ![]() As his father’s health declines, Friend measures every aspect of his own life. It’s also about marriage, family, and what happens when one man plunges into the truth behind his widely held assumptions.įriend’s book is not an easily digestible “Cat’s in the Cradle” lament. Tad Friend’s memoir, In the Early Times: A Life Reframed, is about his father, Theodore Wood Friend III, the former president of Swarthmore College, a public figure who remained inscrutable to his kids.
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