Frederick Exley’s Last Notes from Home is the third book in his loose autobiographical trilogy, following A Fan’s Notes and Pages from a Cold Island.

It is a manic, bruised, obscene, funny, self-lacerating thing: part memoir, part fiction, part drunken American confession, part late-life reckoning with family, failure, masculine performance, illness, fame, Catholic guilt, literary ambition; and it certainly isn't interested in leaving out the evidence.

Exley’s great trick is that he makes self-disgust theatrical without making it noble. The voice is extravagant, bitter, comic, sentimental, and wildly undisciplined in the exact way that makes it feel alive on the page. For readers of autofiction before it became house-trained; for fans of American literary degeneracy, barstool metaphysics, ego collapse, and sentences that stagger beautifully before falling through a window.

First Vintage Contemporaries edition, 1990. Very good paperback with light shelfwear.