Watertown, 1968

Of course, when it comes to one-book authors, none resonates for me as deeply as Frederick Exley, whose "fictional memoir" A Fan’s Notes came out in 1968. As for why this is … well, Exley was a particularly unlikely literary hero, the most implausible writer in the bunch. Born on March 28, 1929 in Watertown, New York, he was an alcoholic who spent much of his life as an unregenerate freeloader, writing sporadically when at all. His relationships, including two brief marriages, were disastrous, and for many years he didn’t even have an apartment, but rotated among friends and relations as a semi-permanent guest.Exley’s inability to function as an adult extended to his inner self, which relied on several external figures—including his father, Earl, and the critic Edmund Wilson—to provide some semblance of definition, as if through their successes, his own lack of accomplishment might be redeemed. Of these personalities, none was more significant than Frank Gifford, whom Exley first encountered at the University of Southern California in the early 1950s, and became obsessed with after moving to Manhattan, where Gifford was a star football player for the New York Giants. As Exley explains in A Fan’s Notes, "I cheered for him with such inordinate enthusiasm … that after a time he became my alter ego, that part of me which had its being in the competitive world of men … Each time I heard the roar of the crowd, it roared in my ears as much for me as for him."In many ways, A Fan’s Notes represents Exley’s one great moment of triumph, a rigorously reflective piece of autobiographical writing that eclipses the distinction between fiction and nonfiction, using the author’s imagined relationship with Gifford as a fulcrum from which to examine "that long malaise, my life." The book received the William Faulkner Award for best first novel, and was a finalist for the National Book Award. That A Fan’s Notes exists at all is nothing short of astonishing, for while Exley spent years fantasizing about being a writer, he had done little of substance before it came out.Yet equally remarkable is the depth to which Exley reveals himself, baring his inadequacies until, beneath the refining filter of revelation, they are transformed. It’s ironic that a book about failure would represent, for its author, the pinnacle of success, as it is that in his explication of fanhood, Exley would turn the spotlight, finally, towards himself. Perhaps the greatest irony, though, is that, ultimately, A Fan’s Notes did little to alter Exley’s life. In the years after its appearance, he taught briefly at the Iowa Writers Workshop, and wrote two additional "novels," Pages from a Cold Island and Last Notes from Home, that complete the trilogy A Fan’s Notes begins. Still, he remained a drunk and a layabout, and even before he died of a stroke on June 17, 1992, he had been largely forgotten, along with his work.

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