A review by stevienlcf
The Splendid Things We Planned: A Family Portrait by Blake Bailey

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.