We Are Rich Hardcover - 2009

Excerpt

Dwight D. Eisenhower once said, “We were poor but the glory of it was we never knew it.” Maybe in Abilene, Kansas, he couldn’t figure it out, but in Rancho Esperanza, California, if your family didn’t have money, no one ever let you forget it. I was nine years old when we moved there, and even though the Vietnam War raged nightly on our Magnavox, and a marching-fucking-drugged-out-rampaging youth was upending America (and all but annihilating the Wasp Establishment in the process), Rancho Esperanza remained a town where Old Money and social rominence went hand-in-glove. Among the rich, and even those of us who weren’t, it was simply understood: pedigree was everything. Not only your pedigree, but your horses’ and your dogs’ as well. My mother, whose parents were humble Danish dairy farmers, took the opposite approach and firmly subscribed to the Scandinavian code of janteloven–don’t show off. Though I suspect this was less a family ethos than a realization that we couldn’t anyway, so why bother trying.

Media reviews

“Dori Carter’s We Are Rich is as compact, colorful and mysteriously artful
as a Mondrian. In other words, it’s a small miracle.”
–Bruce Wagner, author most recently of Memorial and The Chrysanthemum Palace

“[Dori Carter’s] insider’s view...reminds me of the pleasures of first reading John O’Hara and Fitzgerald on the same culture clash in another time not unlike our own.”
–Frank Pierson, screenwriter for Dog Day Afternoon and Cool Hand Luke,
and Artistic Director of American Film Institute

“…Dori Carter writes with the poise of a satirist who knows her subject all too well. Frighteningly, I found myself thinking I knew these people, so many of whom are making real headlines in our current boom gone bust. But that’s Carter's magic–writing with the authenticity of an insider but with the fresh, keen eye of a outsider…”
–Roger Horchow, author The Art of Friendship and Elephants in Your Mailbox

“Wise, funny, provocative and surprising - it reads like a great HBO series: characters interacting over generations in a community that just might be Santa Barbara/Montecito.”
–Philip Kaufman in San Francisco Chronicle’s Recommended summer reads

Santa Barbara Independent
“We Are Rich is Upstairs, Downstairs meets Rashomon meets Brideshead Revisited, all tied up into a neat little bedroom farce.”

Jewish Daily Forward Online
“Beneath the book’s magazine-like front cover is a story that is both gossipy-light and poignant; a sympathetic satire of old money and new money, Jews and Wasps, and time passing under the threat of the California wildfires.”

Santa Barbara News-Press
“A tale of 12 short stories that add up to a whole portrait of a city called Rancho Esperanza, which has many, many similarities to our own. The book examines what happens when the old, rich, white male enclave meets the nouveau riche, and the ordinary people caught in between.”

Planet Jackson Hole Weekly
“The stories [in We Are Rich] are fun to follow, with bite-sized climaxes in every one. Many of the characters re-appear, and the book spans many decades, to enable Carter to better wield suspense over her readers. She provides tiny morsels of much-wanted information at critical junctures in the book…Ultimately, the book is not only good for a laugh, but it will sate your appetite for gossip, mystery and sociology as well. With vivid, if curt, language Carter lets you easily imagine yourself enjoying a cocktail under an oak tree, listening to vapid people talk about how they travel, longing for your first love or having sex with a rich person’s spouse - pick your poison.”

Jackson Hole News and Guide
“Carter writes the way your best friend talks to you, so reading the book feels sort of like hearing some really juicy gossip.”

SB Digs.com
“Dori Carter’s social satire gets into the hearts and souls of her characters, and presents a fresh look at our attitudes toward money and the ever-shifting nature of status in America.”