*Starred Review* Bailey, author of acclaimed biographies of Richard Yates (A Tragic Honesty, 2003), John Cheever (Cheever: A Life, 2009), and Charles Jackson (Farther and Wilder, 2013), once remarked that his aim in writing such books was “to reconcile the paradox of a highly compartmentalized personality.” This memoir suggests that Bailey’s fascination with compartmentalized and addicted people, and his considerable gift for explicating the simultaneous bleakness and beauty of their lives, may stem from personal experience. Goofy and affectionate but deeply self-destructive, Bailey’s older brother, Scott, careened from one disaster to the next, bewildering and disappointing everyone around him. Though Scott has functional moments, including a stint in the marines, during which he became a master sharpshooter, such moments become footnotes to a larger pattern of wrecked cars, jail time, and intoxicated self-pity. Their father, an upright Oklahoma attorney, tries to wash his hands of his son, but Scott becomes increasingly unhinged and unignorable. As his own life begins to blossom, Bailey remains an ambivalent participant in this sad family saga, torn by his antipathy for his brother yet aware of all that they share. 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
“Enthralling… Achingly honest… A fearless, deeply felt and often frightening book…[The Splendid Things We Planned] 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)
“[A] vivid, tender book [written with] humor and frankness…[and] a novelist's flair… A sleek, dramatic, authentically lurid story fueled by a candid fraternal rivalry.” (Janet Maslin - New York Times)
“[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)
“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)
“Vibrantly evocative and car-crash engrossing.” (Clark Collis - Entertainment Weekly)
“One of the most surprising and riveting memoirs of the season.” (Trisha Ping - BookPage)
“It seems fitting that biographer Bailey tells the story of his own life by chronicling his brother Scott’s alcoholism and drug addiction… [His] story captures the contradictions and tensions that simmer just below the surface of the family…and Bailey tells it wonderfully, in a tragicomic tone that slowly reveals the true depths to which his older brother has sunk.” (Publishers Weekly)
“A haunting portrait of more than one tortured soul and a heartfelt probing of the limits of brotherly love.” (Brendan Driscoll - Booklist (starred))
“This fine and haunting memoir touches the spot where family, responsibility, and helplessness converge. It’s not a pretty place, but boy has Blake Bailey made it memorable. The Splendid Things We Planned is as forceful and revealing as any of the author’s excellent biographies, and that’s really saying something.” (David Sedaris)
“A brother’s lament, a hard-won, clear-eyed view of one family’s tortured history, The Splendid Things We Planned is everything we hope for in a modern memoir. Blake Bailey's triumph here is both personal and literary: a beautiful book, rising out of the ruins.” (Dani Shapiro)
“An extraordinary memoir, written with the love and rage of a brother and son, and controlled with the skill of a master biographer.” (Geoff Dyer)
“One of the most sensitive, intelligent and affecting books I’ve read in a long time. The Splendid Things We Planned is the story of an American family, and of two sons whose lives went in very different directions. Though a memoir, it is, perhaps unsurprisingly, reminiscent of the fiction of Bailey’s former subjects Richard Yates and John Cheever in its compassion, its lack of sentimentality and the rich, detailed prose in which it is written.” (Adelle Waldman)
“Among the many remarkable aspects of Blake Bailey's unflinching memoir is the fact that his sense of humor remains, despite these harrowing experiences, so entirely intact. His powers of observation, his gift for the mot juste, and above all his brilliant and offbeat humor make this family story a deeply moving and irresistible read.” (Sarah Shun-lien Bynum)
“Blake Bailey is the closest thing we have to a modern-day Richard Ellmann. How unexpected, but also how utterly perfect, that one of our best literary biographers now reveals the gripping true-life novel at the core of his own experience.” (Tom Bissell)