I’ve read Money, A Memoir three times. Admittedly, I do tend to re-read. There are some favorite novels that I’ve literally read to pieces. But this is the first self-help non-fiction type of book I’ve ever read quite so religiously, and I decided to do a Pillow Talk on it because I honestly feel as if every one of us ought to read this book - and re-read it!

Money is partly a memoir about Liz Perle’s own relationship to money. It opens with a dramatic description of her husband handing her a roll of cash in the Singapore Airport and saying “Go home. Just go.” But it’s also a thoughtful, curious book about women’s relationship to money in general - and those were the parts I found myself re-reading. Perle identifies in herself a strong desire to leave her emotions about money unexamined: “I’ve avoided facing my contradictory feelings about the whole subject, such as the fact that I want to have my own money with the independence it brings, while simultaneously hoping someone or something will step up to the plate and take care of me.” Hey, I recognize that.

So much of our emotional life is driven by our relationship to money. It’s like weight - it creeps into almost every moment of the day. Your bank account affects your daily well-being. How many of you reading this review have brought home a shopping bag and

a) taken off the tags so that your husband/partner couldn’t see them?

b) waved away any inquiries by talking airily about an amazing sale?

c) downright fibbed about the price: “I got an amazing bargain!”

Here’s another question. How many of you know exactly what you need to retire and are on the way to getting it? There’s some scary figures in this book - about women and the fact that one-third of us will end up under the poverty line. The biggest predictor of our future poverty? Death of husband.

I don’t want you to think that I’m lecturing from a superior position. I make a lot of money as Eloisa. But you know what? My husband, a professor, has more retirement income than I do. When we both started out as assistant professors - absolutely equal in terms of publications and degrees - he was offered a larger starting salary. Then we had children. And guess who took unpaid family leave? And then we had a daughter with an illness. Guess who took more unpaid family leave? My professor-self is still squirreling away money…but my Eloisa self is happily spending and not saving.

Gulp.

But this book is not just another one of those scary books about how much money we haven’t saved. I found the most fascinating parts were the chapters talking about how our attitudes toward money are shaped by our parents’ attitude toward money. If you put together parental attitudes and new realities (such as the fact that 1/3 of women in the United States make more money than their husbands), you have an emotional disaster: we’re earning like bread-earners, and not thinking like bread-earners.

Please read this book. Not because it tells you to pay attention to your retirement (which it does), but because it is so utterly fascinating to give up hazy, emotional attitudes toward money and actually start thinking about the role it plays in life and emotions.

The truth is that I’ve engaged in much of the destructive, fuzzy behavior described in this book - waited for a knight in shining armor, overran my credit cards, taken late fees on the chin and all the rest of it. Reading this book I remembered a signal moment from my childhood that seems to have channeled my thinking about money.

I’m going to describe that moment over on the BB - please come on over and describe anything you can remember about how your parents handled money. How do you think that memory/habit has influenced your attitude toward the all-mighty dollar?