The Splendid Things We Planned: A Family Portrait
Blake Bailey, 2014
W.W. Norton
272 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780393239577
Summary
The renowned biographer’s unforgettable portrait of a family in ruins—his own.
Meet the Baileys—Burck, a prosperous lawyer once voted the American Legion’s "Citizen of the Year" in his tiny hometown of Vinita, Oklahoma; his wife Marlies, who longs to recapture her festive life in Greenwich Village as a pretty young German immigrant, fresh off the boat; their addled son Scott, who repeatedly crashes the family Porsche; and Blake, the younger son, trying to find a way through the storm. "You’re gonna be just like me," a drunken Scott taunts him. "You’re gonna be worse.v
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, Blake Bailey has been hailed as "addictively readable" (New York Times) and praised for his ability to capture lives "compellingly and in harrowing detail" (Time). The Splendid Things We Planned is his darkly funny account of growing up in the shadow of an erratic and increasingly dangerous brother, an exhilarating and sometimes harrowing story that culminates in one unforgettable Christmas. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—July 1, 1963
• Where—Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
• Education—B.A., Tulane University
• Awards—National Book Critics Circle Award
• Currently—lives in Norfolk, Virginia
Blake Bailey is an American writer widely known for his literary biographies of John Cheever, Richard Yates, and Charles Jackson. He is the editor of the Library of America omnibus editions of Cheever's stories and novels—and was a 2009 Pulitzer Prize finalist.
Early years and career
Bailey grew up in Oklahoma City and went to college at Tulane University, from which he graduated in 1985. Following graduation, he wrote occasional free-lance pieces and taught gifted eighth-graders at a magnet school in New Orleans.
After publishing a long critical profile of Richard Yates, Bailey contracted to write a full-length biography of the novelist, A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates. Published in 2003, the biography became a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.
In 2005, Bailey was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to work on his biography, Cheever: A Life, which then won the 2009 National Book Critics Circle Award, the Francis Parkman Prize, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. He also edited a two-volume edition of Cheever's work for the Library of America.
In 2010, Bailey received an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. That year he also served as a judge for the National Book Award in Nonfiction and, in 2012, for the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography.
In an interview with the New York Times (11/17/2012), Philip Roth said that Bailey was his official biographer and at work on that project. Recently Bailey published his biography of the novelist Charles Jackson, Farther & Wilder: The Lost Weekends and Literary Dreams of Charles Jackson, as well as a 2014 memoir of his own growing up years, The Splendid Things We Planned.
He is married to Mary Brinkmeyer, a psychologist at Naval Medical Center Portsmouth. Together they have a daughter. The family lost their house and most of their possessions in the 2005 Hurricane Katrina, an experience he wrote about in a series of articles for Slate, the online magazine.
Bailey is currently the Mina Hohenberg Darden Professor of Creative Writing at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 4/15/2014.)
Book Reviews
This is a slender book, one that relies only on memory and acknowledges memory's weakness, especially when alcoholism is involved. And however painful the process of putting it together might have been, [Blake] gives it a novelist's flair. This narrative begins slowly, but it quickly picks up steam and becomes a sleek, dramatic, authentically lurid story fueled by candid fraternal rivalry…The takeaway from this vivid, tender book is that it can be as valuable for a reader to know a biographer as it is for a biographer to know his or her subject. Anyone who reads Blake Bailey's future work…will find it illuminating to know who's telling the story.
Janet Maslin - New York Times
Think of the opening sections of The Splendid Things We Planned, Blake Bailey's achingly honest memoir, as a kind of personality test or perhaps an obstacle course. Not every reader is going to pass, but then again, not every reader is entitled to such a fearless, deeply felt and often frightening book…what lies ahead is a difficult and often remarkable tale of an unhappy family unlike any other…[Bailey] never panders for a reader's sympathy. His prose is clean and graceful without being overwrought, and he often finds unexpected places for deft turns of phrase…it is a testament to his courage that he decided to share this tale at all. It doesn't strive for any false or overreaching profundity, and yet it arrives at a certain undeniable truth about how we are capable of feeling love for people we would never choose to be around.
Dave Itzkoff -New York Times Book Review
Bailey maintains an almost impossible balance between stringent assessment…and a kind of unflappable empathy… The book is as clear-eyed and heartbreaking as any of his acclaimed biographies…yet every bit as compelling.
Kate Tuttle - Boston Globe
Manages to do justice to the tedium of chronic dysfunction without becoming tedious itself…Compelling because of Bailey's emotional acuity as well as his wit, which emerges as an adaptive coping mechanism—a way to survive despair by streaking it with light.
Leslie Jamison - San Francisco Chronicle
[Told with] scathing honesty…grotesque and grimly funny…[Bailey's] struggle as a writer looking for truth and as a brother and son looking for catharsis gives the book an unsettling urgency…its specific story, about a family spinning out of control, naturally points to wider, shared experience, and pushes us to consider what we owe our parents, siblings, and children—and what they owe us in return.
Ian Crouch - newyorker.com
Very entertaining [and] immensely enjoyable—but also profoundly, persuasively sad. Like Mary Karr or David Sedaris, Bailey doesn't try to manufacture an answer to the questions posed by his family's failings.
Elyse Moody - Elle
Vibrantly evocative and car-crash engrossing.
Clark Collis - Entertainment Weekly
It seems fitting that biographer Bailey tells the story of his own life by chronicling his brother Scott’s alcoholism and drug addiction.... Bailey’s story captures the contradictions and tensions that simmer just below the surface of the family, as they try to live a normal suburban life in Oklahoma...and Bailey tells it wonderfully, in a tragicomic tone that slowly reveals the true depths to which his older brother has sunk.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) The Bailey family...live[s] the American dream.... Or so it seems. But Scott—handsome, impetuous, and selfish—allows his demons to take over..... [A] maddening portrait of Scott—and the rest of the Baileys, seen through the lens of Scott's descent—takes shape. The effect of the writing and Bailey's own wrestling with time, memory, and loss lingers after the final passages. —Patrick A. Smith, Bainbridge Coll., GA
Library Journal
(Starred review.) Goofy and affectionate but deeply self-destructive, Bailey’s older brother, Scott, careened from one disaster to the next.... The result is a haunting portrait of more than one tortured soul and a heartfelt probing of the limits of brotherly love. As the memoir’s epigraph achingly reminds us, “You can hate a person with all your heart and soul and still long for that person.” —Brendan Driscoll
Booklist
[A] bleak, repetitious memoir.... The title...comes from a song Scott liked, Roy Clark's 1969 "Yesterday When I was Young": "…The thousand dreams I dreamed, the splendid things I planned/ I always built to last on weak and shifting sand." Bailey gives no evidence of his or his brother's splendid plans, only decades of depression, isolation and insidious self-absorption.
Kirkus Reviews
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