Canceled Lives: My Father, My Scandal, and Me
On April 1, 2025, the new memoir by the lauded biographer Blake Bailey hits the bookstores. Some in the publishing industry might consider the publication a cruel April Fool’s joke, but it’s actually an important story—and a tragic one to boot.
For those readers who went into hibernation during the spring and summer months of 2021, let’s recap the unseemly tale of Bailey’s rise to stardom and fiery fall from grace. Before the merde hit the proverbial fan, Bailey was hailed as America’s, and maybe the world’s, greatest living biographer. In 2009 he won the National Book Critics Circle Award for his magisterial life of John Cheever. In that same year, he won the Francis Parkman Prize and was a finalist for the Pulitzer. He had been the Louisiana Humanities Teacher of the Year in 2000, and he had been given a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2005.
Between 2003, when his well-received Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates was published, and in 2021, with the explosive arrival of his authorized Philip Roth biography, Bailey published a highly regarded life of Charles Jackson and a memoir of his dysfunctional family and his older brother’s long walk toward suicide, The Splendid Things We Planned: A Family Portrait.
Without question, Bailey was a rising star, but in the spring of 2021 with the publication of Philip Roth: The Biography, his fame became dizzying, the sort of success that appears to break all of the established barriers of light and sound. He was swept up in “cultural ubiquity.” But his whirlwind success also landed him on the dark side of a fairy tale. Like Midas or Rumpelstiltskin, cursed with wish fulfillment, Bailey watched as his fractured life and career exploded before his very eyes.
The Roth biography, one of the most anticipated works of nonfiction to arrive in the 21st century, hit The New York Times bestseller list at number 12 in its first week in the stores. Cynthia Ozick called the book a narrative masterwork. She declared that it had a Dostoyevskian magnitude, and that biography was the new 19th century novel, and Blake Bailey was one of its supreme practitioners. Other major reviews, podcasts, talk shows, interviews, requests to lecture followed.
And then very quickly came accusations of sexual grooming of middle school students in New Orleans that started, according to the accusations, when he was a popular and successful teacher from 1993–2000. Allegations of grooming morphed into accusations of rape. His agent dropped him. Norton canceled the Roth biography. Bailey’s wife said “enough” and initiated divorce proceedings. He was never convicted of any crime, but his life and his career were over.
Bailey admits to many of his flaws as a husband. He doesn’t excuse his infidelities, but he does deny doing anything illegal with any women. There is no question, however, that Canceled Lives is, if not an apologia, a defense of his legal, if not moral, situation. It is also an argument against the instinct to cancel books because the writer’s character might not meet our standards. Canceling writers whose private talk or behavior doesn’t meet our moral or social criteria might lead to a slippery slope where books by Ezra Pound, Graham Greene, Mark Twain, Flannery O’Connor, and, yes, Philip Roth would be tossed into the burning pit.
Immorality and illegality are not necessarily the same thing. As Bailey himself puts it: “One may be inconstant without being a predator or a misogynist; indeed, one may be a doting parent and have other sterling qualities besides.” Bailey may be letting himself off a bit easy in this sentence, but he has a point. An individual might be a jackass and a great writer, as well. And have written a book that is truly “a narrative masterwork.” Should the book, the reader might rightly ask, be thrown out with the dirty bathwater?
Ultimately, Canceled Lives springs from its subtitle My Father, My Scandal, and Me. That is, the memoir is about the cancel culture and Bailey’s sad fall from grace, but it is also about Bailey’s complicated, Freudian-fueled relationship with his father, Burck.
In the opening chapter he refers to Burck as the man “I’d called Papa and kissed on the lips all of my life. . . .” Bailey’s need to win his successful lawyer-father’s approval is evident in every corner of the story. Throughout his telling of the tale, Bailey is self-aware and brutally honest about his father’s cruelties and love, his strangled esteem and his winsome generosity, and also about his own selfishness and narcissism. He tells the story of his fall from being a globetrotting speaker and one of the most respected biographers in the world to a ghostwriter living in an old friend’s pool house in Oklahoma, and he does it all in an idiom that is at once wry and graceful, playful and self-referential, stitching together high and low styles masterfully.
The narrative ends with Burck’s death and Bailey living what he feels is a “posthumous life.” But as disastrous as his fall has been, he is able to say this: “Oh, it’s not all bad. Relieved of strenuous old ambitions, I try to savor the simple pleasures of being alive in the biological sense: I have my little sanity rituals, I sleep more, I swim and whack tennis balls . . . I cook and eat nice meals. I see old friends.” One can’t help but be reminded of Francis Weed in Cheever’s “The Country Husband” and hope for Bailey, the flawless writer and flawed human being, that “it is a night where kings in golden suits ride elephants over the mountains.”