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In what follows I correct the digitized version of Broyard's review which first appeared in The New York Times on 28 October 1984. Yates' novel appeared in the same year. Blake Bailey masterfully recounts the book's reception in A Tragic...
At the start of her eighth grade year, Heather was struggling. She was insecure, and lonely, and she wasn’t getting along with her mom. She worried that she wasn’t popular enough, or attractive enough, and that she’d never have a boyfriend. These insecurities were hard to talk about. The one place she felt comfortable expressing them was in Mr. Bailey’s English class. By 1998, when Heather entered eighth grade, the 35-year-old Blake Bailey was already a legend at Lusher Extension, a magnet middle school in New Orleans. A published author, he was funny, charismatic, and academically de...
More than 20 years before I got up the courage to send an open letter to the New York Times accusing my former English teacher Blake Bailey of grooming his eighth grade students and then, years later, coercing us into sex—or, in my case, just holding me down and doing it even while I cried “no” and “stop” repeatedly—I sent a very different letter on his behalf. I wrote his nomination for the Louisiana Humanities Teacher of the Year in 2000, an award he went on to win. Advertisement I described how he gave me the language to discuss poetry and literature, how he insisted that his s...
Print this article The next time literary biographer Blake Bailey sits down to write a book, would it be possible for him to select a subject who isn’t a) a disconsolate failure, b) a deeply unhappy husband, c) an awful alcoholic, or d) a paranoid, self-involved ass? Close to two decades have passed since the publication of Bailey’s 2003 life of novelist Richard Yates, with which the biographer announced himself as our chief chronicler of troubled 20th-century writers. In A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates, Bailey affixed his gaze on the massively talented but almost c...