The Splendid Things We Planned: A Family Portrait Author: | Language: English | ISBN:
B00HSR87LM | Format: PDF
The Splendid Things We Planned: A Family Portrait Description
The renowned biographer's unforgettable portrait of a family in ruins - his own.
Meet the Baileys: Burck, a prosperous lawyer once voted the American Legion's "Citizen of the Year" in his tiny hometown of Vinita, Oklahoma; his wife Marlies, who longs to recapture her festive life in Greenwich Village as a pretty young German immigrant, fresh off the boat; their addled son Scott, who repeatedly crashes the family Porsche; and Blake, the younger son, trying to find a way through the storm. "You're gonna be just like me," a drunken Scott taunts him. "You're gonna be worse."
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, Blake Bailey has been hailed as "addictively readable" (New York Times) and praised for his ability to capture lives "compellingly and in harrowing detail" (Time). The Splendid Things We Planned is his darkly funny account of growing up in the shadow of an erratic and increasingly dangerous brother, an exhilarating and sometimes harrowing story that culminates in one unforgettable Christmas.
- Audible Audio Edition
- Listening Length: 8 hours and 8 minutes
- Program Type: Audiobook
- Version: Unabridged
- Publisher: Blackstone Audio, Inc.
- Audible.com Release Date: March 3, 2014
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00HSR87LM
With this memoir Blake Bailey establishes that his writerly gifts are not limited to literary biography. Author of splendid, definitive biographies of Charles Jackson, Richard Yates, and John Cheever, Baily unflinchingly documents the almost unbearable dislocations and tensions that befall what, from a neighborly distance, might look like an ordinary upper middle class American family. This designated "family portrait"--conveyed at the book's onset by a photograph of the smiling Baileys flanked by sentinel St. Bernards--charts the torturous interrelationships between the parents, Marlies and Burck, and their sons, Scott and Blake.
It is not a happy family, and as Tolstoy noted famously in Anna Karenina, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own distinctive way. The principal tension in this story is generated by the evolving antipathy between the author and his increasingly deranged older brother Scott. While there are early signs that Scott is not quite anchored to practical, waking life, he is, at least to outward appearances, a lanky, attractive boy through the onset of adolescence. He progressively becomes a smoker, a pot smoker, an alcoholic and multiple drug addict, a serial car-wrecker, a delusional vagrant, and ultimately an impossible presence in everybody's life.
"Home," Robert Frost wrote, "is a place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in." But Frost was thinking of a flinty old New England hired hand, not Scott Bailey. For the Bailey parents, divorced and relocated in early middle life, taking their elder son in was an invitation to a house fire or worse.
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