You Probably Won't Get a Novel as Good as Revolutionary Road This Way, Though

A year and a half ago, in reviewing A Tragic Honesty, I wrote [in PW] that Blake Bailey "has done a great job of sorting through the facts of [Richard] Yates's difficult life, assembling them into a story that mirrors the best of his subject's fiction. Robert Birnbaum interviewed Bailey and explored why the biographer "spent three years researching a man's life, who, it appeared to [Birnbaum], was probably miserable for at least the last half, maybe all of his life, every day of his life." Bailey's short answer? "Yates's life was always more depressing to other people than it ever was to him. As long as the writing was going well, Yates didn't much care."

Further details should disabuse any of you who still find the writing life inherently glamorous:

"[L]et's not lose sight of the fact that Yates, through whatever chaos of mental illness and alcoholism, was extremely disciplined as a writer. Yes, he would wake up colossally hung over every morning--every morning--and throw up. Just a routine thing because not only was he hung over, [but] he had pulmonary problems and he needed to clear everything out. Then he'd write for four hours...

"He would have maybe a couple of Michelobs at lunch at the Crossroads [a bar near Mass Ave on Beacon Street], and then he would take a nap and then he would write again in the afternoon, having written four hours in the morning. And then he would go and get drunk for dinner. But goddamn, by that time he had written for seven hours."

If you don't have time to read the full biography, try a quick introduction to Yates, or at least avail yourself of Stewart O'Nan's appreciation.