Synopses & Reviews
Frederick Exley's inimitable "fictional memoir" A Fan's Notes has assumed the status of a classic since its first publication in 1968. Mordantly and poignantly, Exley describes the profound failures of his life professional, sexual, and personal. His attempts to find a place for himself in an unaccommodating world take him from the University of Southern California to Chicago where he meets the dangerously seductive, lovely Bunny Sue Allorgee to New York City's Greenwich Village saloons, and back to Watertown, his hometown in upstate New York, where he spends months on his mother's living room davenport watching television before undergoing shock treatment at Avalon Valley hospital. Between bars, women, and jobs, Exley exercises his obsession with the New York Giants and their great halfback Frank Gifford, until he at last realizes his life's ambition: writing A Fan's Notes.
Review
"Mr. Exley is a very good writer...there's a lot of wit and bravado in this book, but it's more painful than funny." The Nation
Review
"A Fan's Notes is strong, beautiful, American, one of a kind." Kurt Vonnegut
Review
"A singularyly moving, entertaining, funny book." New York Times
Review
"Writers of every kind of aesthetic and cultural persuasion talk about it with one another, and press it on their friends to read....When I urge A Fan's Notes on a friend who asks what is it about? or what is it like? I say read it, just read it." Geoffrey Wolff, Los Angeles Times
Review
"A welcome reminder of what the basic business of literature and of living really is. All fans of art and life should read it." Jack Kroll, Newsweek
Synopsis
This fictional memoir, the first of an autobiographical trilogy, traces a self professed failure's nightmarish decent into the underside of American life and his resurrection to the wisdom that emerges from despair.