For this woman, financial struggles are tied to the heart

FOR the first half of her adult life, even as she rose to the upper echelons of the publishing industry, Liz Perle was on a private quest. Her grail was not a promotion, not a fat salary -- she had those -- but a man: “the man who would sweep me up, marry me, and make sure that whatever work I did in the future would be for love, not money.” When she met him at last, a few years into her 30s, she felt not romance but “relief.”

But as “Money, A Memoir” opens, Perle is on a plane with her small son, fleeing the ruins of her marriage with no job, no home and $1,500. The “quiet contract with cash” she’d made long ago -- she would willingly earn it and marry it, she just “didn’t want to have to think about it” -- was broken. The rest of the book recounts her journey toward a more clear-eyed, less fraught relationship with money, bolstered by the personal accounts of scores of similarly anxious and ambivalent women.

If you can find yourself reflected in these stories, Perle’s hybrid self-help memoir is worth reading. As she herself confesses, “I feel a hint of hopefulness when I listen to someone who has made all the mistakes I have, along with a few more that I have yet to sample.” Some of her generalizations about women and money are all too true: we are reluctant to discuss money openly, we stink at negotiating for ourselves, we trade in relationships rather than hard currency, we settle for “recognition rather than remuneration.” And many of us do still believe in Prince Charming.

But too much of her argument moves in a direction many readers won’t go. “We need money and resent the fact that we do,” Perle writes. “The fact is that we spend more on face cream and shoes than we do on our retirement funds.” We who? Statistics may bear her out, but if you aren’t the type to indulge in “debt-defying impulse spending” or lie to your mate about how much you spent, this book will infuriate rather than enlighten.

It becomes increasingly clear that Perle isn’t really writing about money. These stories are about women’s ongoing reluctance to assume responsibility for their own security, whether financial or emotional. That’s part of growing up, and too many of the women here sound like they never will. Perle sees antagonism in every marriage, with even like-minded partners eventually opposing each other as “the Hoarder or Spender, the Worrier or Dreamer, the Responsible One or Magical Thinker.”

Perle seems to believe that power within relationships is correlated directly to income -- there are no examples here of stay-at-home mothers who direct the family finances in partnership with their working husbands (or the opposite, for that matter). She turns away from the possibility that financial dependence and emotional independence can coexist, that the family can be a stronger unit than the individual. Most of the women she describes as having a mature, unemotional attitude toward money have learned through divorce.

The strength of the book lies in Perle’s willingness to “be the first fool,” to lay out her own insecurities and missteps with total candor. She describes her “Inner Stewardess,” a fawning pre-feminist persona that used to emerge whenever someone -- an angry boss, a disinterested suitor -- threatened the job or the relationship on which her financial hopes were pinned. “There are women, and I am one of them, who need to know that everything is going to be okay,” Perle writes. Far more women have felt that way than would be willing to admit it.

But if it’s a “hint of hopefulness” that Perle wants to leave her readers with, she has failed. The book begins and ends with her hard-won mantra: “[H]appiness is wanting what you have, not having what you want.” Her second husband is a great guy, but he makes less than she does, and yet she finds herself content with “more inner security than outer security.” Still, she made him sign a prenuptial agreement. The larger, perhaps unintentional message of “Money, A Memoir” is surprisingly sour: If every partnership is threatened by money, power and resentment, we are all ultimately on our own.

Janice P. Nimura’s reviews have appeared in the New York Times and the Washington Post.