If
Bukowski wrote less like
Hemingway and more like
Nabokov you might get Exley. Or you might get a headache. What Exley did for me was really spell out some of the reasons for being an alcoholic/drug user. He manages to pinpoint his own reasons for misery without making that the point of the book. He tells a great story about what it's like to be a watcher, a fan, and how we come to be at peace with the symptoms of "Nevergonnamakeitbig." As part of the MTV generation and a target of the force-fed dreams of stardom funneled down my throat, I can really relate to the emotions that football, basketball, and other sports aroused in the baby boomer generation ? not to say that sports-feeding ever stopped. After reading his biography,
Misfit: The Strange Life of Frederick Exley (by
Jonathan Yardley), I came to the conclusion that Exley tried his best to write about what he knew and added some "fiction" to make his own life more interesting.
A Fan's Notes speaks to the overwhelming desire to "be somebody" and the endless excuses as to why you "can't right now."