The Splendid Things We Planned: A Family Portrait Audiobook

Quotes

• “This fine and haunting memoir touches the spot where family, responsibility, and helplessness converge. It’s not a pretty place, but boy has Blake Bailey made it memorable. The Splendid Things We Planned is as forceful and revealing as any of the author’s excellent biographies, and that’s really saying something.”

  — David Sedaris

• “An extraordinary memoir, written with the love and rage of a brother and son and controlled with the skill of a master biographer.”

  — Geoff Dyer, National Book Critics Circle Award winner

• “Enthralling…Achingly honest…A fearless, deeply felt, and often frightening book…[The Splendid Things We Planned] arrives at a certain undeniable truth about how we are capable of feeling love for people we would never choose to be around.”

  — New York Times Book Review

• “The book brings a surprising degree of humor and frankness to describing some of the most humiliating moments in its author’s life…A sleek, dramatic, authentically lurid story fueled by candid fraternal rivalry.”

  — New York Times

• “Vibrantly evocative and car-crash engrossing.”

  — Entertainment Weekly

• “Perhaps celebrated biographer Blake Bailey’s fascination with the secret lives of others has its roots in his own colorful family tree; his memoir, The Splendid Things We Planned: A Family Portrait, suggests it’s so.”

  — Vanity Fair

• “Very entertaining [and] immensely enjoyable—but also profoundly, persuasively sad. Like Mary Karr or David Sedaris, Bailey doesn’t try to manufacture an answer to the questions posed by his family’s failings.”

  — Elle

• “Manages to do justice to the tedium of chronic dysfunction without becoming tedious itself…Compelling because of Bailey’s emotional acuity as well as his wit, which emerges as an adaptive coping mechanism—a way to survive despair by streaking it with light.”

  — San Francisco Chronicle

• “[Told with] scathing honesty…grotesque and grimly funny…[Bailey’s] struggle as a writer looking for truth and as a brother and son looking for catharsis gives the book an unsettling urgency…its specific story, about a family spinning out of control, naturally points to wider, shared experience and pushes us to consider what we owe our parents, siblings, and children—and what they owe us in return.”

  — NewYorker.com

• “A haunting portrait of more than one tortured soul and a heartfelt probing of the limits of brotherly love.”

  — Booklist (starred review)

• “It seems fitting that biographer Bailey tells the story of his own life by chronicling his brother Scott’s alcoholism and drug addiction…[His] story captures the contradictions and tensions that simmer just below the surface of the family…and Bailey tells it wonderfully, in a tragicomic tone that slowly reveals the true depths to which his older brother has sunk.”

  — Publishers Weekly

• “Bailey’s memoir is a more genteel, though no less accomplished, update of Harry Crews’s A Childhood, with details layered in an unflinching fusillade until a poignant, maddening portrait of Scott—and the rest of the Baileys, seen through the lens of Scott’s descent—takes shape. The effect of the writing and Bailey’s own wrestling with time, memory, and loss lingers after the final passages.”

  — Library Journal

• “A brother’s lament, a hard-won, clear-eyed view of one family’s tortured history, The Splendid Things We Planned is everything we hope for in a modern memoir. Blake Bailey’s triumph here is both personal and literary: a beautiful book, rising out of the ruins.”

  — Dani Shapiro, bestselling author of Devotion

• “Blake Bailey is the closest thing we have to a modern-day Richard Ellmann. How unexpected, but also how utterly perfect, that one of our best literary biographers now reveals the gripping true-life novel at the core of his own experience.”

  — Tom Bissell, award-winning author of Magic Hours