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

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/