A Fan's Notes; A Fictional Memoir

[12], 385, [3] pages. A Note to the Reader. DJ has slight wear and soiling. His first book, and the subject of a 1972 film. Frederick Earl "Fred" Exley (March 28, 1929 - June 17, 1992) was an American writer. His fictional memoir A Fan's Notes received critical acclaim and awards. He followed it up with two more fictional memoirs. In 1952, Exley dropped out of USC and moved to New York City to find employment, only to return a year later to complete a BA in English. He returned to New York to work in public relations for New York Central Railroad. After a year there he relocated to their Chicago office, then began working for Rock Island Railroad in the same capacity. Exley soon took over as managing editor of the railroad's employee magazine, The Rocket, where his first published writing appeared. Exley was institutionalized three times in the 1950s after entering an itinerant period marked by acute alcoholism, obsession with New York Giants football, mental instability and schizophrenia that was to provide much of the autobiographical material for his first book, A Fan's Notes. His alcoholism growing worse, Exley began a decade of briefly-held jobs and institutionalization, while continuing to work on A Fan's Notes. In 1964, Exley sent the manuscript for A Fan's Notes to Joe Fox at Random House, who suggested an agent, Lynn Nesbit who sold it to Harper & Row. A Fan's Notes prompted widespread critical acclaim. The novel was a finalist for the National Book Award, and received the William Faulkner Award for best first novel, and the National Institute of Arts and Letters Rosenthal Award. Exley's cult classic, a fictional memoir based on the author's real struggle, complicated by alcohol abuse and mental illness, to avoid being a lifelong "loser." Son of a fabled high school athlete in Watertown, NY, but with no interest in athletics in a sports-rabid town, Exley's only joy was in watching, through an alcoholic haze, the NY Giants on television on Sunday afternoons at a local bar. A Giants' victory would seem to justify, for a few hours, his misshapen life. In between football games, drinking bouts, shock treatments and insulin therapy, Exley would venture out into the world to play at being a normal, successful, young man on-the-go only to find each attempt driving him toward insanity again bringing him to the conclusion he is not a hero but merely a fan. Derived from a Kirkus review: A first novel of unquestionable dynamism, Frederick Exley's is "autobiographical," a form which permits the writer to stay closer to life while surfacing more freely above conventional disciplines. Exley's is a documentary of experience exposed, sometimes assessed, and often numbingly intensified. In Glacial Falls, upstate New York where he is teaching, life begins again for Exley as it does every Sunday in a bar, with the amber allure of the bottle just before the Giants' game flashes on the screen. His father had been a great football player and had heard the roar of the crowd; Exley's fate is to only be a fan, an intransigent truth he reaches only many drinks, many years later. This then follows him through long, lost intervals in and out of a New York hospital for the insane; a summer in Chicago and his first, incomplete "season of love"; his assaults against the real world of making a living and failing to accept its responsibilities; his marriage to uncomplaining if un-understanding Patience, protected by her money; and through a whole series of wild flights with some randy, rummy characters-Bumpy and The Counselor and Mr. Blue. Finally, all these crippling dreams and grandiose fantasies end with the acceptance of "life's hard fact of famelessness." But then as Lawrence said, "the quick of all time is the instant." Exley's book has many instants, many moments. It is unmistakably vital and reads obsessively, obliteratingly.…