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This is a slender book, one that relies only on memory and acknowledges memory's weakness, especially when alcoholism is involved. And however painful the process of putting it together might have been, [Blake] gives it a novelist's flair. This narrative begins slowly, but it quickly picks up steam and becomes a sleek, dramatic, authentically lurid story fueled by candid fraternal rivalry…The takeaway from this vivid, tender book is that it can be as valuable for a reader to know a biographer as it is for a biographer to know his or her subject. Anyone who reads Blake Bailey's future work…will find it illuminating to know who's telling the story.
Janet Maslin - New York Times


Think of the opening sections of The Splendid Things We Planned, Blake Bailey's achingly honest memoir, as a kind of personality test or perhaps an obstacle course. Not every reader is going to pass, but then again, not every reader is entitled to such a fearless, deeply felt and often frightening book&#8230what lies ahead is a difficult and often remarkable tale of an unhappy family unlike any other…[Bailey] never panders for a reader's sympathy. His prose is clean and graceful without being overwrought, and he often finds unexpected places for deft turns of phrase…it is a testament to his courage that he decided to share this tale at all. It doesn't strive for any false or overreaching profundity, and yet it arrives at a certain undeniable truth about how we are capable of feeling love for people we would never choose to be around.
Dave Itzkoff -New York Times Book Review


Bailey maintains an almost impossible balance between stringent assessment…and a kind of unflappable empathy… The book is as clear-eyed and heartbreaking as any of his acclaimed biographies…yet every bit as compelling.
Kate Tuttle - Boston Globe


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.
Leslie Jamison - 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.
Ian Crouch - newyorker.com


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.
 Elyse Moody - Elle


Vibrantly evocative and car-crash engrossing.
Clark Collis - Entertainment Weekly


It seems fitting that biographer Bailey tells the story of his own life by chronicling his brother Scott’s alcoholism and drug addiction.... Bailey’s story captures the contradictions and tensions that simmer just below the surface of the family, as they try to live a normal suburban life in Oklahoma...and Bailey tells it wonderfully, in a tragicomic tone that slowly reveals the true depths to which his older brother has sunk.
Publishers Weekly


(Starred review.) The Bailey family...live[s] the American dream.... Or so it seems. But Scott—handsome, impetuous, and selfish—allows his demons to take over..... [A] 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. —Patrick A. Smith, Bainbridge Coll., GA
Library Journal


(Starred review.) Goofy and affectionate but deeply self-destructive, Bailey’s older brother, Scott, careened from one disaster to the next.... The result is a haunting portrait of more than one tortured soul and a heartfelt probing of the limits of brotherly love. As the memoir’s epigraph achingly reminds us, “You can hate a person with all your heart and soul and still long for that person.” —Brendan Driscoll
Booklist


[A] bleak, repetitious memoir.... The title...comes from a song Scott liked, Roy Clark's 1969 "Yesterday When I was Young": "…The thousand dreams I dreamed, the splendid things I planned/ I always built to last on weak and shifting sand." Bailey gives no evidence of his or his brother's splendid plans, only decades of depression, isolation and insidious self-absorption.
Kirkus Reviews