A Fan's Notes, by Frederick Exley

I came across A Fan's Notes by the one and only self-loathing, award winning, Frederick Exley, while randomly scrolling Substack one day.

It may have been a post from @kylerseibel or @thelincoln (both great writers) celebrating the book, though I can't remember. Not that it matters, but I had a few other books I was in the middle of and put them all down to get into Exley's. Mind you, no one is holding me to this schedule, but I have a habit—a bad one—of seeing these kind of fly-by posts and immediately putting down whatever I'm doing or reading to go check out that thing. It is a compulsion and probably a verifiable disease. Weirdly enough, I had it on my shelf.

I do this with buying books too (which is probably why I had it). Luckily, smartly, I've created a Bookshop.org account and made a list titled WANT TO READ and thrown those impulses in there. I suggest this. It's working, for now, and, given I had never read Mr. Exley before—author of Pages from a Cold Island and Last Notes from Home, nominated for the National Book Award, recipient of the William Faulkner Award, and winner of the National Institute of Arts and Letters Rosenthal Award, among others—I'm glad I did.

This isn't a book review so I won't go into providing a summary.

Instead, I will say A Fan's Notes, for the first time in a long time, made me laugh out loud while reading. It also made me flinch.

Maybe because I was, and in my heart still am, a down-and-out degenerate, and reading debauchery like this—written fast and wild, about daytime drinking, ping-pong battles, and tortured writers lamenting the task of their craft over beer after beer with bartenders who had nothing else to do but listen—made me feel connected to Exley in some terrible way I hadn't felt in a long time. Being sober for over a year now, my vices are all but gone... leaving me shaking and moving and dealing with blows of life day to day without any liquid libations to take the edge off. In many ways, I make my own edge now, which I couldn't do if I were leaning on the booze.

Because Exley (at least the Exley in A Fan's Notes) is terrible: a mad, vicious, genius (questionable) drunk who, throughout the book, steals money, takes advantage of young women (some passages come across as potential rape?), leaves his two sons and wife to fend for themselves, and more. Bad stuff. Today, in 2026, a book like Exley's with an anti-hero like him would surely never be published or, if it were, rolled out at a place like Passage Publishing, an American far-right publisher. More on them here. That said, the prose was electric, rhythmic, and, as noted, very funny, and therefore was granted the ability to be published because of all those things wrapped in his clear literary and artistic background and general gravitas of intellect.