An Unfortunate Woman: A Journey (original 1994; edition 2001)

`You old hippy, you', the bookseller said to me when I bought this. What a cheek, I thought.

The last chapter in a unique American Author's life. Found and published by his daughter, it's a poignant story of endings.. chosen and unchosen. ( )

An aimless, plotless narrative lost in time, but in a good way. A middle-aged man is alone, bored with his life, daydreaming, rambling, contemplating death and the past few months of his life, and, above all, writing the book you're reading. He's depressed and addressing depressing subjects, but it still somehow manages to be fairly uplifting, happy book. Brautigan's just got a way of saying things that never fails to make me smile. It's probably his most candid book, although he never quite lets you trust whether it's autobiographical or not. ( )

Is there a better author? Read this on a train between Guildford and Portsmouth in January 2008

Richard Brautigan first offered An Unfortunate Woman to a French publisher, so the story goes, unable to find a publisher in the States. According to Marc Chenetier, to whom he gave the manuscript, Brautigan hoped that a French publisher would publish "his work for its literary make-up merits rather than out of some period anecdote-based fan cult he had no use for."

In other words, he wanted to be taken seriously as a writer, rather than a throwback to the wild and drug-addled 1960s. Unfortunately, it seems a lot of people read half this book and then wrote it off as self-indulgent nonsense from an aging hippie. But the self-indulgence is deliberate: ride out the digressions and the metafictional riffing, and you arrive at a devastating conclusion that justifies everything that came before.

Is it fiction, or memoir, or a combination? It doesn't matter. It's neither a conventional narrative, nor a reprise of Trout Fishing in America. It's Brautigan's claim to be taken seriously, and it should be.