The Splendid Things We Planned, by Blake Bailey

[Stacey]

This is a riveting memoir that I read for Week 28: A biography, autobiography, or memoir --about a family caught up in their older son's mental problems. The Splendid Things We Planned: A Family Portrait is a sobering look at how untreated mental illness can wreak havoc on all those around them - past, present and future.

The question I had was why didn't parents Burck and Marlies ever seek help for their older son? Medication and psychological treatment were available in the late '70's, weren't they? Unfortunately, these so-called adults were too self-absorbed in their own 1970's lives, growing increasingly disconsolate over their marriage and careers. This seems to be an unfortunate byproduct of the "me decade" of the 1970s -- as the divorce rate increased, women sought careers and jobs outside the home, men questioned their worth and the kids were left to fend for themselves. As a young mom, Marlies was unhappy to leave behind her intellectual life in Greenwich Village, NYC. Living in Oklahoma, she was usually half in the bag, drinking with gay pals and canoodling with Arab students, while father Burck looked the other way and remained consumed with his formative law career.

But even as an infant, there were signs that something was wrong. Scott screamed and cried unceasingly - an indicator of the troubled life he would invariably lead. As a child/youth, he displayed an aloofness and put on false airs that he was too good for the banal, too good for menial jobs, too smart to read books. By the time he was 16, he was a pimply, eccentric youth -- and a drunk.

Blake decribes Scott's painful life in great detail as it fully devolved. From an arrogant, irresponsible youth to alcoholic, drug addict, felon, Marine, vagrant, social/sexual deviant and ultimately, violent psychotic. As he and others attempt to reason with Scott, trying to make him seek help, Blake does so with sympathy, humor and love. We learn that the author suffered plenty himself: living in his brother's shadow, Blake couldn't hold down a job, dabbled in career after career and became an alcoholic in his 20's. He didn't get his own life together, becoming a teacher to gifted students and marrying, until he was well into his 30's. He became estranged from his father, while his increasingly judgmental stepfamily grew more disillusioned with he, his brother and their lifestyles.

I offer my thanks to Blake Bailey, who is a skilled writer and brutally honest in sharing each agonizing and mainly tragic tale from his past. The story is often difficult to read, but like a traffic accident (and Scott had many of these), it's hard to look away.