Money Changes Everything: Twenty-Two Writers Tackle the Last Taboo with Tales of Sudden Windfalls, Staggering Debts, and Other Surprising Turns of Fortune

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The Guy Next Door
Ours is a culture of confession, yet money remains a distinctly taboo subject for most Americans. In this riveting anthology, a host of celebrated writers explore the complicated role money has played in their lives, whether they're hiding from creditors

The Guy Next Door, Part 2
I needed to figure out how much to wager at the auction, so that night I sat down and did the actuarial work. Two hundred and fifty dollars and seventy-seven cents a month was about $3,000 a year.

The Guy Next Door, Part 3
More mindful now of John's existence, I suddenly realized that, like me, he almost never had anyone to his apartment. His one friend was a lady named Loretta, who, accompanied by her yippy little shih tzu, would sidle up to the intercom at our building's

The editors of The Friend Who Got Away are back with a new anthology that will do for money what they did for women's friendships.

Ours is a culture of confession, yet money remains a distinctly taboo subject for most Americans. In this riveting anthology, a host of celebrated writers explore the complicated role money has played in their lives, whether they're hiding from creditors or hiding a trust fund. This collection will touch a nerve with anyone who's ever been afraid to reveal their bank balance.

In these wide-ranging personal essays, Daniel Handler, Walter Kirn, Jill McCorkle, Meera Nair, Henry Alford, Susan Choi, and other acclaimed authors write with startling candor about how money has strengthened or undermined their closest relationships. Isabel Rose talks about the trials and tribulations of dating as an heiress. Tony Serra explains what led him to take a forty-year vow of poverty. September 11 widow Marian Fontana illuminates the heartbreak and moral complexities of victim compensation. Jonathan Dee reveals the debt that nearly did him in. And in paired essays, Fred Leebron and his wife Katherine Rhett discuss the way fights over money have shaken their marriage to the core again and again.

We talk openly about our romantic disasters and family dramas, our problems at work and our battles with addiction. But when it comes to what is or is not in our wallets, we remain determinedly mum. Until now, that is. Money Changes Everything is the first anthology of its kind-an unflinching and on-the-record collection of essays filled with entertaining and enlightening insights into why we spend, save, and steal.

The pieces in Money Changes Everything range from the comic to the harrowing, yet they all reveal the complex, emotionally charged role money plays in our lives by shattering the wall of silence that has long surrounded this topic.

Jenny Offill was born in Massachusetts and raised in California and North Carolina. Her stories have appeared in Story, Gettysburg Review, The Black Warrior Review, and Boulevard. Jenny is the author of the novel Last Things. She teaches in the M.F.A. writing program at Brooklyn College. She lives in Brooklyn, New York..

Elissa Schappell is the author of the novel Use Me, a contributing editor to Vanity Fair, and a cofounder of Tin House..

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