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

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.