![]() Though this memoir is clearly intended to be a portrait of an era as well, it comes across mostly as the story of one seriously disturbed individual. Jackson, Cheever, and Yates-whose personal lives were deeply intertwined with the perils and pleasures of alcohol, their generation’s drug of choice, used fiction to capture the decadence and quiet desperation of that era. Writers of fiction can alter their source material at will to make it more interesting. ![]() Scott Bailey couldn’t handle it and his parents, like many at the time, had their own problems keeping themselves and the family intact as the values of the fifties fell by the wayside.Īny memoir has to have resonance beyond the personal. This was (and is) easier for some people than others. There was a lot of peer pressure in the sixties and seventies-to keep your cool, handle your drugs, handle your liquor, handle your own mind. ![]() By the time Scott was sixteen, Bailey writes, “Life with my family was becoming a serious bummer for all concerned.” This kind of understatement lends charm to an unremittingly grim family portrait. The episodes that marked his life make for dramatic reading and occasional humor. Scott Bailey never fully matriculated into adulthood, though he lived to fifty-three. into the quarry, where if you didn’t clear the rocks… Some of those wild boys channeled their daring into boldly successful lives. Many of us who came of age in the 1970s knew someone like Scott-handsome, the first to drop acid, do shots, the one who dove naked at 3 a.m. The baby on the roof was Blake Bailey’s older brother, Scott he was the second-born, but Scott’s increasingly destructive behavior defined his childhood. This turns out to be one of those half-true jokes parents tell on themselves, normally, once their children are thriving. This child never thrived, and Bailey’s family would spend the rest of this child’s life pushed to the edge by his behavior. He opens with a heart-stopping scene of his young parents standing on the roof of a building at New York University in the early 1960s, holding their colicky, howling infant and trying to decide whether to jump together or toss the baby. ![]() This memoir shows that Bailey knows that terrain from personal experience. Reading Blake Bailey’s memoir of his deranged brother, The Splendid Things We Planned, I kept thinking of a line from the epigraph Bailey quotes from Joe Gould’s Secret, Joseph Mitchell’s portrait of another troubled soul: “You can hate a person with all your heart and soul and still long for that person.” Bailey is the author of acclaimed literary biographies of John Cheever, Richard Yates, and Charles Jackson, all of whom wrote about the desperation behind mid-century American prosperity. ![]()
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