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cathyatratedreads's review against another edition
4.0
This memoir was a harrowing, exhausting experience for me to read. It had to have been a thousand times that for the author and his family to actually live through. Blake Bailey, our author, who is now a respected biographer, turns his lens on his own history, and it's just plain ugly. His brother, three years older than he, was, quite simply, screwed up. Scott Bailey drank and took drugs and crashed cars and was often cruel and vulgar to those he loved best. He could be loving, with a sharp sense of humor, but his rough side won out most of the time. His family -- his younger brother, his attorney father, and his German-born mother -- gave him chance after chance to improve, and he squandered those chances, blowing them up in people's faces.
The book is not for the faint of heart. It's full of vulgarity and LOTS of really bad language and crude references. Mostly, it's hardest to read if one knows a similar character to Scott. It's hardest to watch someone waste their life, blaming the screwups entirely on everyone else.
Bailey is a stellar writer, and his story is worth telling.
Read my full review, including a rating for content, at RatedReads.com: https://ratedreads.com/splendid-things-we-planned-memoir-book-review/
The book is not for the faint of heart. It's full of vulgarity and LOTS of really bad language and crude references. Mostly, it's hardest to read if one knows a similar character to Scott. It's hardest to watch someone waste their life, blaming the screwups entirely on everyone else.
Bailey is a stellar writer, and his story is worth telling.
Read my full review, including a rating for content, at RatedReads.com: https://ratedreads.com/splendid-things-we-planned-memoir-book-review/
nixieknox's review against another edition
3.0
Usually by the time I get to the end, I've had it with memoirs but not so with this. If only his other books weren't heavy-duty biographies!
I think it's hard find the right balance when writing about addicted family members, but he did.
I think it's hard find the right balance when writing about addicted family members, but he did.
dolcezzina21's review against another edition
4.0
This book came recommended by David Sedaris. Very well written and very close to home for me in a lot of ways, sad to say. But as we see through this book and our own lives, even with family dysfunction, grief, and hard times, there is still love.
stevienlcf's review against another edition
3.0
Bailey's moving memoir recounts his outwardly splendid youth in Oklahoma City with his father, Burck, a successful lawyer, his mother, Marlies, a party-throwing intellectual, and his older brother, Scott, whose early promise is destroyed by an increasing reliance on drugs and alcohol. There is a menance that permeates this book: good parents are at the mercy of poor dumb luck.
krissyronan's review against another edition
3.0
A portrait of drug addiction's impact on a family. This memoir is dark but beautifully written. Much of it takes place in Oklahoma City which I liked because I knew the locations the author talked about.
heather_g's review against another edition
3.0
Very sad story of a family, in particular one brother. The other brother is the author who chronicled their unusual childhood and the older brother's drug/alcohol abuse at an early age, then recovery, then lapse back to abuse.
jaclynday's review against another edition
4.0
Many families have angst around spending the holidays together, but it’s doubtful that many stories can compare to Blake Bailey’s account of the final straw moment between himself, his mother, and his violently unpredictable, alcoholic brother Scott. Bailey describes a surreptitious visit to the police station with his mother (who only agrees to the plan because Bailey reminds her to “think of her cats”) and the nervous, manic aftermath as Scott is led out of the home to a local motel where he proceeds to drunk dial them several times throughout the night. Bailey goes with his mother to buy a gun in case Scott comes back. (He’s been violent with them before and has threatened to kill them.) Bailey rolls out of the car, SWAT-style, and does a perimeter check of the house holding the new gun before giving the all-clear for him and his mother to endure what’s left of the holidays. Many family-centric memoirs are darkly funny, but this one of the few moments in The Splendid Things We Planned that could qualify. The rest is mostly just dark—Bailey’s spare, honest account of growing up idolizing his older brother and the gradual but swift turn in the other direction. He becomes embarrassed, then angry, then distant, as Scott becomes more unpredictable, more drunk, more reliant on drugs. The family crumbles under the pressure and Bailey finds himself in the position all too familiar to so many people: stuck in the place between hatred and love, unwilling to bend too far in either direction. He wants his brother and loathes him too, and Bailey makes their connection obvious even in the midst of the book’s most tumultuous moments. It’s a searing look at the push-and-pull dynamic of family—a heartbreaking account of how hard it can be to resolve blood relations to either love or hate.
bethnellvaccaro's review against another edition
5.0
I couldn't put this horrifying, yet often funny story of one very disturbed brother and the family dysfunction that surrounded him. The author is so honest about himself and all of his own flaws that he ends up redeeming myself in my opinion.