Beer Money: A Memoir of Privilege and Loss, by Frances Stroh

The autobiography of an artistic daughter of a beer tycoon, Beer Money has almost nothing to do with beer, but everything to do with how we can't really choose your family and how toxic interacting with them can be. I liked the writing and sad as it is, the book was not meant to be dramatic, only truthful.

It was a difficult book to finish, even as it was very personal, as I like biographies to be. Mostly because it is just biographical, with nothing in the lives of the characters that has any meaning. The only lesson one can learn from the book is that once you realize your family is crap, you should stay away, no matter how difficult it would be. A very valuable lesson, I agree, but singular.

Frances Stroh is part of the old German family that introduced fire brewed beer to the US on a large scale. Their Detroit empire imploded from bad management by family members, the collapse of the car industry and so on. And while that was going on, she had to contend with a passive mother, a father with an inflated ego who couldn't care less about the people around him unless in rare moments that seemed like a heavenly gift to respect and love deprived children, siblings who went into drugs and alcohol to avoid the pain and last but not least the lukewarm reaction of the world to her own artistic ambitions.

The author seems to have accepted her fate and the strained love/disappointment relationship with the most important people in her life. I liked it and I thought Frances Stroh has a gift for melancholic writing, but I can't really recommend it to most people.