I want to thank my editor at Portfolio, Maria Gagliano, for giving me the one thing each and every newspaper writer truly needs: money. By that, I mean having enough faith in my ideas and ability to give me a big-time publishing contract so that I might see my work lining the shelves of America’s remaining major bookstores (both of them). In addition, I can’t thank Maria enough for her deft and sure editing of my manuscript. Also, for the money.
That same thanks goes to my agent, Sam Fleishman of Literary Artists Agency, who resurrected the idea for this book and, thanks to his own very great enthusiasm, talent, and book biz savvy, landed us a deal in just six weeks, even after this book proposal had languished for two years. Also, Sam handles the money.
Another agent, my friend Lori Perkins, provided invaluable insight into the world of publishing in person, via Twitter, and through her book The Insider’s Guide to Getting an Agent. New School writing teacher, author, and consultant (and former fifth-grade girlfriend) Sue Shapiro also provided invaluable guidance and encouragement, as did her husband, the very gracious and witty Charlie Rubin.
I also have to mention the late Wall Street Journal columnist Jeff Zaslow, who first encouraged me to pursue the idea for this book. The inspiration to turn my original “Grand Experiment” columns into something more came from Terri Thompson, director of the prestigious Knight-Bagehot Fellowship in business at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. I can still hear her shout, “This should be a book!” when she called to tell me that I’d won the Christopher J. Welles Memorial Prize for the “Grand Experiment” columns, and that sense of excitement kept me plugging away at this project, even when few others seemed to shared her enthusiasm.
At The Detroit News, I have to thank Mark Truby and Don Nauss for making me a columnist in the first place and who, with Sue Burzynski Bullard, championed a column that must have been something quite a bit different from what they expected. I want to thank publisher Jon Wolman for his strong support and for allowing me to reuse some material from my columns, and Michael Brown for arranging all the legal details. I also want to thank Sue Carney for backing the original “Grand Experiment” series, and Joanna Firestone for continuing to support the column. Mary Elson of Tribune Media Services deserves thanks for adding Funny Money to the lineup of quality TMS features, as does James Lower for his patience and attention to detail in fine-tuning my weekly efforts for the syndicate.
Most of all, I want to truly thank my biggest fan and best friend, Rich Friedman, and my best-ever coworker and psychological bodyguard, Christine Tierney, for all their advice, help, encouragement, and support. Whoever wrote “Friends double our joy and divide our grief” clearly had them in mind.
This book wouldn’t be possible (or necessary) without the spineless Democrats and obstructionist Republicans, Teabilly morons, lying banksters, incompetent and oblivious Treasury officials, greedy mortgage servicers, cynical corporate executives, and their obsequious lobbyists, as well as austerity-worshiping economists, ignorant Beltway deficit scolds, bond vigilantes, and, last but not least, those clueless regurgitators of failed conventional wisdom who call themselves political and economic commentators. You’ve all kept the American economy in such dire straits that a book about budget cutting written at the end of the Great Recessepression in 2009 is needed now more than ever, even after four years of “recovery.” Really, guys, you shouldn’t have.
Finally, to the working (and hoping-to-work) men and women of this country who do their best to earn a living, contribute to society, and provide for their families at a time when their own bosses, bankers, government servants, and elected representatives are doing everything in their power to make you feel just that much more scared and poor every day, I hope this book helps a little.
A note about late talkers: I’ve mentioned that my son is a “late talker,” which refers to a child who initially shows limited vocabulary development at eighteen to thirty months old, despite being intelligent, responsive, engaged, and otherwise typical. There can be a lot of reasons for this, and most late-talking kids will eventually catch up in their language if they get the right help. They often are misdiagnosed as autistic, and they can demonstrate some autistic-looking behaviors in their attempts to navigate the world with their limited language. Autism programs are the wrong way to remedy late talking in children who aren’t autistic and can actually make the situation much worse. If you suspect late talking is an issue for your child, visit the Late Talkers Foundation online,1 contact the Natural Late Talkers support group,2 and consult an experienced speech pathologist. It’s also helpful to read The Einstein Syndrome: Bright Children Who Talk Late and Late-Talking Children, both by the economist Thomas Sowell.3
You can e-mail me at brian@funnymoneyblog.com or follow me at www.funnymoneyblog.com and on Twitter @BrianOCTweet. Let me know what advice worked for you, what didn’t, and if I got anything wrong. On the blog you can find links to all of the online references mentioned in this book, plus the recipes from chapter 10. (Yes, even Aunt Frannie’s Chili.)
Mrs. Funny Money and Funny Money Jr., or, as we call him, Li’l Money (’cuz that’s all he leaves us), are characters entirely based on my family. This is not because I am making stuff up, but because anyone who wrote a humorous newspaper column that used the real names of his wife and son and reported their dialogue verbatim would soon find himself without a column, a family, or, more likely, both. Nonetheless, everything described in this book actually occurred, so I won’t have to face a scolding from Oprah. Finally, I can’t thank my wife and son enough for their patience, forbearance, understanding, and general good humor in tolerating my habit of mining our family life for material. As an author with a day job, I’d like to think I wrote this book in my spare time, but I really wrote it in my family’s spare time.
No raccoons were harmed in the production of this book.