First Fall in Gainesville

In the fall of 1991, Grayson is 40 years old. He's published some well-reviewed books of short stories and has worked as a college English teacher for 16 years, but he also has recently gone bankrupt and feels that his career as a fiction writer is over. So he enters law school at the University of Florida, moving alone to Gainesville, a town he'd never been in before and where he knows no one. FIRST FALL IN GAINESVILLE is Grayson's diary from his first semester of law school. Like Scott Turow's memoir ONE L or John J. Osborne Jr.'s novel THE PAPER CHASE, it gives the reader a sense of the process fledgling law students go through as they learn to "think like like a lawyer" -- except that it's from the day-by-day perspective of a 40-year-old who knows that he will never practice law and who is cynical about the process from the start.