Author(s): Frederick Exley

Fiction

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.