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

3.0

The memoir of a family utterly without compassion. We follow the lives of Bailey and his family, with a focus on his brother Chris’s spiral through drugs, jail, alcohol, vagrancy, and finally death. Bailey is unsparing (and, one might argue, cruel) in his dissection of the important moments that laid the path to the inevitable suicide of his brother, but there is little empathy in his brush--he is the Lucian Freud of memoirists, and seems to almost rejoice in his detailed descriptions of the pimples on his brother’s face and the dissolute lives that he and his brother lead. He draws a surprisingly delicate veil around the issue of child abuse, which is hinted at and which would make sense--when children behave cruelly towards one another, it is generally learned from the adults around them. As searingly revealing as the book is, the harshness of each family member seems strange from one who makes a living as a biographer. Without empathy or compassion, the entire family seems doomed from the start.