Exley's stratagem of writing an autobiographical novel in the guise of fiction gets at "truth" from an objectively subjective vantage point. This distancing effect proves purposeful: painfully funny events which might easily become maudlin instead amuse, retaining the tone of a confession and thereby ensuring reader empathy. The author's deliberate conflation of "historical" and "narrative" truth also sustains reader interest. We wonder: what "really" happened? What did not?

A Fan's Notes opens with the narrator watching a football game, having what he believes, at the time, to be a heart attack. The discovery that he "still has a will to live" triggers a flashback, one that recounts significant lived events leading to this moment wherein Exley, the character/narrator/author, sees himself as he imagines others do: a small-town, high school English teacher who suffers through each week for the "release" fleeing town to watch football in a...