Blake Bailey. Photo by Mary Brinkmeyer.

In his exhaustive biographies of the writers John Cheever, Richard Yates, and Charles Jackson, Blake Bailey has stitched together portraits of complicated lives with great insight and attention to detail. In his new memoir, The Splendid Things We Planned, he applies the same exacting vision to his own family.

Splendid Things, named for a lyric from the 1969 Roy Clark Song "Yesterday, When I Was Young," is a tale of demons -- Bailey's own, as well as those of his mentally unstable and addicted brother, Scott, and their prosperous suburban parents. Their struggles -- as individuals and in their attempts at familial union -- are interspersed with darkly comic revelations worthy of Homer Simpson.

Bailey, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, is currently at work on an authorized biography of Philip Roth. Since the announcement that Roth has agreed to grant Bailey exclusive access to papers, friends, and family, and to make himself available for extensive interviews, we’ve been waiting eagerly. And now that we know vital elements of Bailey’s own story, his reading of Roth will be all the more fascinating.

This week, he joined me for a conversation from the road.

BIOGRAPHILE: Hi there. Are you in Oklahoma on book tour?

BLAKE BAILEY: I am. Last night I read at Full Circle Bookstore in Oklahoma City, housed in the same thirteen-story building [50 Penn Place] where my brother, Scott, once hung from a horizontal flagpole on the roof.

BIOG: And where he considered offing himself, right?

BB: Right. Because of his own shenanigans twenty years before, though, they thought better about leaving the door to the roof unlocked, so he was thwarted in that simple wish.

BIOG: And then he didn't want to pay one dollar for a bus ticket to another tall building.

BB: Exactly.

BIOG: In a New York Times video posted this week, you quote Voltaire as saying: "To the dead we owe only the truth." Is that the same mentality you have in writing biography?

BB: Absolutely so. I have no interest in skewing the facts either toward my subjects' virtues or flaws. I'm an empiricist: I gather the evidence, see where the various themes are, find an enticing structure for telling the story, and let it rip. Human perfection, in short, is not a phenomenon that interests me. Nor is human corruption. Humanness per se is.

BIOG: I know it's been said a lot in response to this book, but your choice of biographical subjects -- Cheever, Yates, Jackson, I'm not sure about Roth -- makes more sense in retrospect, knowing your story. What parallels did you find in writing yours versus theirs?

BB: I never consciously chose my subjects because of their alcoholism or whatever. I chose them because I admired their work. That said, the fact that their work tends to be about outwardly prosperous suburban families whose lives are blighted by alcoholism and mental illness might have had something to do with my interest. And I hasten to add that Philip Roth doesn't drink and is little concerned with such matters in his fiction. So my versatility will be tested.

BIOG: Maybe on an unconscious level, you respond to something beneath the surface in the work of Cheever, Yates, and Jackson.

BB: Absolutely. And in their lives, I find the same intricate compartmentalization -- the careful way addicts hide themselves from the world while cultivating a florid inner life.

BIOG: In the eleven years it took to write the book, how many false starts did you have? How did you end up with the opening scene as is? It reminds me of something I've heard about learning the ways in which couples meet: That story contains the DNA of the relationship.

BB: The opening scene was always the same: my young parents on the roof of my father's dorm at NYU Law School, holding the ceaselessly squalling infant Scott and wondering whether to throw him or themselves off. I don't know how many drafts I wrote of the whole book. It was mostly a matter of adding more about me, and my family, to balance the stuff about Scott. Also, my perception of Scott evolved over the years -- healthily for the most part.

BIOG: So you were certain about the opening scene since it was so integral to the family myth?

BB: Yes, that scene was the place to start. Look, this is about four people who loved each other, irresistibly and rather tragically so, the way even bad families do in spite of themselves, but were, at bottom, very different people who wanted different things out of life. And in the midst of them was Scott.

BIOG: And what seems to be a maddeningly frustrating lack of diagnosis or proper treatment, though not to the fault of anyone involved. I got the sense that everyone had stretched as much as possible.

BB: Agreed. I frankly don't understand people -- and there have been quite a few -- who wonder why we didn't do more to help Scott. I can't imagine what else we might have done. If anything, I think Scott could have used a lot less help from others. Like any addict, he had to decide to help himself, and that's a decision he never stuck to for very long.

BIOG: At least you're raising the question for other people to ask of themselves and their relationships: What is the line between care and enabling? On another note ... Was it cathartic and/or painful to write about your own life?

BB: More cathartic than painful. For years, I almost never discussed Scott with my very close friends from home, who knew us both, or even much with my wife. It was humiliating and painful. Now I can talk about it -- or rather, I don't have to, because I've put it into a book. And yes, I'm very happy with how the book turned out.

BIOG: I was struck to learn that your wife never met your brother. It's like there's a Part I and a Part II to your life: Scott and Post-Scott. Did you consciously decide to position yourself as "Blake, Scott's brother" versus “Blake, the literary biographer"? You didn't include your successes, and I wonder why.

BB: Yes, I like that: the Part II, Scott-less part of my life is the better part. And I'm frankly glad my wife never had to share the burden of all that. Of course she knows how the grief takes me at times -- and it does -- despite my basic relief that Scott is gone. As for my successes, such as they are: Anyone can look at the author bio on the jacket and see what I've done with the post-Scott part of my life. An important task of memoir is being selective, and I think I was highly selective here. You have to know very precisely what your story is, and my later career need only be implicit vis-à-vis the way Scott affected my life and vice versa.

BIOG: What motivated you to write about your brother? Could or would you have written about him in some form if he were still alive?

BB: I started writing the book eleven years ago, when Scott was still alive, but (I knew) not for long. I knew I'd never see him again, and I was rather grieving his loss in advance. I wanted to sort out what had happened to him, and our family, so I started writing the book. It was a very complicated undertaking, needless to say.

BIOG: In that same Times video, you say that your mother was concerned about her privacy being invaded as you were writing the book, but ultimately, she’s happy with the result. Did you negotiate with her along the way?

BB: Yes, we negotiated. She helped me remember certain things -- especially relating to her -- with greater clarity, and has been a very good sport about things. But it was dicey for both of us. Bottom line: She's pleased with the final product, and I'm pleased that she's pleased.

BIOG: Sounds like a happy ending, as much as there can be one under the circumstances.