Canceled Lives

My Father, My Scandal, and Me

De: Blake Bailey

Narrado por: Blake Bailey

A canceled bestselling author’s highly personal account of his public scandal—a scandal that was reported on the front page of the New York Times and throughout the world.

Blake Bailey grew up in the shadow of his father, Burck, an eminent litigator—president of the Oklahoma Bar Association and widely considered a sort of real-life Atticus Finch: “His conduct, honesty, integrity, and courtesy best exemplify and represent the highest standards of the legal profession,” his colleagues commended him in a 1989 award citation.

As for Blake, he was a late bloomer who finally came into his own as a writer. His fourth literary biography, Philip Roth, was published on April 6, 2021, and hailed as “a narrative masterwork” by Cynthia Ozick on the front page of the New York Times Book Review. The 900-page book debuted at #12 on the Times Nonfiction Bestseller list.

But success came at a terrible price: because of revelations in Bailey’s biography, many were calling for Roth and his work to be “canceled,” while others thought Bailey had been overly sympathetic and even “complicitous” with his subject’s worst failings. Soon rumors exploded on the internet about Bailey’s own private life, and within days he himself was roundly canceled.

Canceled Lives is the story of a father and son who had much in common—for better and for worse—and who supported each other in the midst of terrible family strife, including the drug addiction and suicide of Blake’s older brother, Scott. Having achieved a success in life that Blake, at least, never expected, both father and son were ravaged by the ordeal of Blake’s spectacular public humiliation.

©2025 Blake Bailey (P)2025 Skyhorse Audio

Reseñas de la Crítica

“[In Canceled Lives, Bailey] 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.”—Michael Patrick Pearson, New York Journal of Books

“Blake Bailey is the best literary biographer in America. The swiftness of his cancellation and that of his masterful Roth biography revealed the degree to which lemming-like groupthink has permeated our cultural establishment. Canceled Lives vividly depicts the toll such heedless actions take on individuals and families.”—Brooke Allen, author of Twentieth Century Attitudes: Literary Powers in Uncertain Times and Moral Minority: Our Skeptical Founding Fathers

“Blake Bailey is a fine writer who writes painfully in Canceled Lives about having his biography of Philip Roth removed from distribution by its publisher. What an astonishing comedown after receiving a wonderful front-page review in the New York Times book section by Cynthia Ozick! Canceled Lives tells the whole sad story and the personal pain Bailey suffered. His publisher had no right to do what they did to him. This book about accusations of terrible behavior and its effect on a book and its author goes beyond memoir and reveals the profound harm such assertions can cause. It deserves a wide and discerning audience."—Martin Garbus, Prominent First Amendment Lawyer