Quotes from Mignon McLaughlin
“People keep telling us about their love affairs, when what we really want to know is how much money they make and how they manage on it.”
I came across this quote by Mignon McLaughlin in the latest Sun magazine. (McLaughlin was an editor and writer, born the same year as my father and married to an editor at Time, a guy my father surely knew.) It comes from decades ago, but how exact it is to this day. Perhaps especially in these days, when people will describe their sexual escapades down to the last inch of skin, but stay thoroughly coy about their finances.
Mignon McLaughlin
It was in reaction to this fact that I explained, in The Last of His Mind, exactly how much I was paid from my father’s bank account to look after him during the year I spent at his house. Suffice it to say that no reviewer has commented in any detail about the sexual revelations in the book, but quite a number remark on the fact that I was paid, and how much (a thousand a week, plus expenses).
I’d say we’ve come quite a distance in getting over our general shame about sex—but we’ve barely started when it comes to money.
It’s a wonderful world, really, in which one of the guys I play tennis with can tell the rest of us, in easy good humor, how his wife was giving him a blow job one morning when abruptly he was overcome by vertigo, so bad they had to call an ambulance. “I was giving him a blow job,” she explained to the squad—perhaps a relevant medical fact. In the Emergency Room, more explanations, quite loud. “By now,” he told us, “I’m sure the whole town knows.” Of course, it was a promising sexual story, not a disastrous one, and I’m glad to report that the vertigo has not returned.
It was years ago that Michelle Ajamian alerted me to what she saw as an imbalance in sexual and financial revelations. When some new boyfriend of hers wanted to hear all about her sexual past, replete with details, she’d tell him, “Okay. I’ll tell you all about that if you’ll tell me all about your money.” None of them ever did. Money, apparently, was too intimate, too delicate, too revealing.
In closing, another pair of Mignon McLaughlin quotes:
“Many who would not take the last cookie would take the last lifeboat.”
And: “People are like birds: on the wing, all beautiful; up close, all beady little eyes.”
Wish I’d known her!
on sex and money, as i recall, you responded to that critique with the invitation to me that we tell each other everything about our money. (we had already told all about the other, as i recall.)