Cancelled Lives: My Father, My Scandal, and Me by Blake Bailey is a short read, only 150 pages.

It is a cancelled bestselling author's personal account of his public scandal. A scandal that was reported on the front page of the New York Times and around the world.

Blake Bailey grew up in the shadow of his father Brick who was a known litigator and president of the Oklahoma Bar association. Blake was starting to come into his own as. a writer when he wrote his Fourth biography about Philip Roth. His biography his the best sellers list, but the more that it was featured the more people started to dislike and discredit it, going further and looking into Blake, and asking for him to be cancelled.

I wanted to like the book, and thought the premise was interesting however I just couldn't get into it. I found it really boring and found it read more like a news report versus a book.

Thank you Blake for sharing your story and for partnering with NetGalley. I received an advanced reader copy of this book in exchange for my honest opinion and review.

I'm sympathetic to cancel culture and I don't know this guy so I was interested in hearing his story. Honestly, he just seems like an elitist lib who went running for cover when cancel culture came for him. It's giving, "I never thought the leopards would eat MY face!"

Also, I just didn't care for his writing style. It was deliberately pretentious and I grew weary of looking up French loanwords and expressions. This isn't terrible but it isn't terribly interesting either.

Thanks to NetGalley for the chance to read and review.

As an author’s latest work is being published, and will hopefully make his father proud at last, things are afoot. He’s about to learn what cancel culture is all about. I so enjoyed the interplay between Bailey and his father Burck during such a difficult time in the author’s life.

In reviewing this, I came to the people involved without prior knowledge - apart from Roth, of course. I had not heard about Blake Bailey or his father, so was able to read his version of events without having already consumed the material which led to what he calls his “cancellation.” Whatever this book is, it is certainly not a work of apology or accountability. It is, to some degree, an account of an often troubled relationship between a father and son. I found the most interesting and meaningful components of this book to be the references to the wisdom and insights of the author’s ex-wife.