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MADISON, Wis. — Shaking hands with Tom Farley Jr., I don't quite see the resemblance to Chris.

Shorter, darker and much thinner than his late brother, Tom, at 46, looks like the businessman and dad he is, where Chris, who died 10 years ago at 33, never outgrew his resemblance to an enormous kid.

Over coffee, though, I can see that, behind Tom's glasses, his eyes are light blue, the same shade that looked out from all those pictures of his kid brother. But, growing up in a play-together, stay-together kind of Madison family, of course, the two brothers had more in common than just their eyes.

Tom, who has come to talk about his new biography, The Chris Farley Show, displays some of his famous sibling's restless energy and ready humor. There's also the gentlemanliness — Chris, despite his notorious excesses, was famous for that among friends — that prompts Tom to arrange our meeting a mile east of the Capitol so I don't have to fight traffic on my way in and out of town.

Then there are the things you can't see. Some of them are in the book, notably Tom's own history of alcohol and drug abuse and the years of rationalization that kept him thinking that, well, at least he — like his parents and two of his three other siblings, onetime heavy drinkers all — was no Chris in that department.

Chris stopped using alcohol and drugs more than a dozen times, only to die while under the influence of both. Tom has been clean and sober for years, a former teetotaler who now limits himself to a pint of Guinness on St. Patrick's Day.

But, for all his success battling these demons, another continues to haunt him.

That, too, was a huge one for Chris.

"Food is the worst thing," Tom says, gesturing toward the modest paunch under his polo shirt. "My wife is a marathon runner, but me, I can't get myself to eat right and exercise and lose these 20 extra pounds."

It's tempting to say that Tom is Chris writ small, but that's unfair to both of them. A more complicated and far more interesting version is in the book, called The Chris Farley Show, which Tom wrote with comedy writer Tanner Colby.

Many of the funniest and saddest stories are from those who knew Chris at Marquette University in the mid-'80s, including Matt Foley, the buddy whose name he swiped for one of his most outrageous SNL characters, a wigged-out motivational speaker.

Naturally, the book has lots of stories from his brothers — not just Tom but Kevin, 42, and John, 39, both actors. Tom and his co-author talked to Chris' only sister, Barb, 48, and their mother, Mary Anne, 72, but wound up not using their anecdotes in the book.

"For my mother," Tom explains, "it's still very hard. It's still about losing her son."

The Farley patriarch, Tom Farley Sr., died at the age of 63, 15 months after Chris was found dead in his Chicago apartment. Some of his children were surprised that Tom Sr. lasted that long.

Both an alcoholic and a voracious eater for much of his life, Tom Sr. turned huge. He weighed 600 pounds when he died. For years before that, until his health collapsed and he was essentially housebound, he was the life of the party.

But it's a funny thing, his son tells me: "When my father died, we figured out that it was really Mom who was the funny one. She's just hilarious, but in a quieter way than he was. That's where Chris got a lot of it."

Long before Chris made a name for himself on SNL from 1990-'95 and in movies like Tommy Boy and Black Sheep, the Farleys were semi-legendary in the well-heeled Madison suburb of Maple Bluff.

They were one of those big, hospitable Irish Catholic families everyone knew from church or Edgewood High or just because there was always something fun happening at their house.

Much of the fun involved drinking. Cocktails were served and comedy ensued. Tragedy came later.

For those prone to addiction, the Farley household "was a perfect storm," Tom says: freely flowing booze, a love of parties and a firm refusal to talk about "personal" problems. You drank too much, you sobered up on your own, then you drank some more the next day.