The Sam Mendes film of Revolutionary Road is released in January. To stay ahead of the hype, I'm planning to read all my Richard Yates books again. As prep, I'm going to start with Blake Bailey's biography of Yates, which I keep dipping into but have never read cover to cover. It has great quotes. Here's a description of the mentally ill, self destructive and alcoholic Yates, at a particularly low point:

"Sometimes his grandiosity was such that he became convinced he had an urgent message to the world and was on the verge of something big. But perhaps the most definitive symptom was an agitated inability to communicate, to understand and make himself understood amid the depths of his own bewilderment."

That sounds like me on a Monday morning.