The Splendid Things We Planned: A Family Portrait

BLAKE BAILEY is the author of award-winning biographies of John Cheever, Richard Yates, and Charles Jackson, and he is at work on the authorized biography of Philip Roth. His articles and reviews have appeared in Vanity Fair, Slate, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and elsewhere. He lives in Virginia with his wife and daughter.

''A haunting portrait of more than one tortured soul and a heartfelt probing of the limits of brotherly love.'' --Brendan Driscoll - Booklist (starred review)

''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

''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

''One of the most surprising and riveting memoirs of the season.'' --Trisha Ping - BookPage