The Favorite Game

Wayne · Post by **Wayne** » Sat Jan 08, 2005 12:44 am

started reading this book a week ago.

I hear it's semiautobiographical.

Anyone know how much of it is fact or fiction?

Energized_Slave · Post by **Energized_Slave** » Sun Jan 16, 2005 5:50 am

I like to think that it is, since it's probably my favourite book (pardon the pun). Like anything, there probably is enough to be considered semi-autobiographical and there's probably enough to fall over to the side of fiction as well.

Either way, enjoy it and let us all know what you thought of it.

tom.d.stiller · Post by **tom.d.stiller** » Sun Jan 16, 2005 7:14 am

Welcome to the forum, Wayne. Please feel at home.

Energized_Slave, I know that TFG has been described as "semi-autobiographical", but I think it's as autobiographical as Oscar's "Picture of Dorian Gray" was. The author has lived through most of the essential sequences, but he changed them to achieve a literary purpose, and he invented others to stress his points...

Breavman is Leonard, but Leonard is not Breavman, not in a lifetime... Some idiosyncracies Leonard aid off like old clothes by writing TFG.

So Breavman is part of what LC once was.

Tom

linmag · Post by **linmag** » Tue Jan 18, 2005 12:30 am

When asked something along those lines, Leonard once said (and I paraphrase!) that he and Breavman shared some of the same experiences, but they reacted to them differently, so grew into two different men. In other words, Leonard drew on some of his own experience for particular incidents, but Breavman is not Leonard.

catherine · Post by **catherine** » Sat Jan 29, 2005 3:10 pm

Do you think Leonard would have liked to become more like Breavman?
Because Breavman's perspective at the end of the book seems to be
that of a very independent young man who is going to rise above things such as women trouble and emotional chaos quite easily.

tom.d.stiller · Post by **tom.d.stiller** » Sun Jan 30, 2005 6:54 am

Caroline, I believe Leonard is glad enough to have grown into his own self. But probably there will have been times, when he regretted not to have chosen a different path...
I reckon that's the normal way lives go...

Tom

linda_lakeside · Post by **linda_lakeside** » Sun Jan 30, 2005 8:32 am

That is certainly the way my life went. Being Breavman never entered my mind, either.

tom.d.stiller · Post by **tom.d.stiller** » Sun Jan 30, 2005 9:26 am

maybe Breavwomen?

linda_lakeside · Post by **linda_lakeside** » Sun Jan 30, 2005 9:57 am

Perhaps in the singular sense? No, even then I'd feel out of place.

Linda.

tom.d.stiller · Post by **tom.d.stiller** » Sun Jan 30, 2005 10:01 am

forgive me the typo, i never ever thought of you as a committee of lindas...

Anne-Marie · Post by **Anne-Marie** » Sun Jan 30, 2005 6:02 pm

The young boy who got killed at camp is fiction, though the boy was based on a real character.

Mostly everything in the book is based on actual people and events.

I love that book. I become so engrossed reading it.

linda_lakeside · Post by **linda_lakeside** » Sun Jan 30, 2005 6:14 pm

I first read Favourite Game a long time ago. Then about a year ago, I bought a 'fresh' copy and read it on the bus back to my present abode. Now, as much as I love it, I won't need to read it for another however many years. Beautiful Losers was a more difficult read for me. Eg. I probably wouldn't have finished it on the bus.