Line #66 Literature/IPartridgeWeNeedToTalkAboutAlan


1	[[quoteright:350:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/alan_partridge_bibliography.jpg]]
2	[[caption-width-right:350:Needless to say, he had the last laugh.]]
3	''I, Partridge'' -- or, to give the full title, ''I, Partridge: We Need to Talk About Alan'' -- is a chronicle of the life of [[UnsympatheticComedyProtagonist broadcasting legend]] Franchise/AlanPartridge, as written by the man himself[[note]]with Rob Gibbons, Neil Gibbons, Armando Iannucci and Steve Coogan[[/note]] and released in 2011.
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5	The autobiography [[UnreliableNarrator accurately]], [[SmallNameBigEgo humbly]] and [[BlatantLies honestly]] chronicles Partridge's [[JadedWashout glorious]] career from humble and difficult Norfolk beginnings surrounded by bullying schoolmates [[SuspiciouslySpecificDenial whose torments he is now completely over and towards whom he holds no grudges whatsoever]] and monstrously {{Abusive Parent}}s [[SuspiciouslySpecificDenial whose cruelty he is not simply exaggerating or outright making up in order to make his childhood seem more edgy and interesting]]. From this, he charts an early career as a reporter in local radio which led to the heights of to an ill-fated career at Creator/TheBBC as a radio and television sports commentator and chat show host, which came to a premature end mainly thanks to the spite and jealousy of people who just didn't get him or his amazing abilities (and only a little bit due to the fact that [[StylisticSuck his show was rubbish]], [[Radio/KnowingMeKnowingYouWithAlanPartridge he accidentally shot a guest dead live on air and then punched his boss during the follow-up Christmas special]]). Partridge then soberly reflects on his divorce from his unfaithful wife and his descent into [[MundaneMadeAwesome Toblerone addiction]], before ending with his triumphant return to his local radio roots where he is [[BlatantLies completely happy and content, with absolutely no desire to get back on television whatsoever]]...
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7	Okay, okay, ''seriously'' now, it's a parody of nakedly self-serving and egotistical entertainment autobiographies, based on the popular British comedy character Alan Partridge. Written by his creators (including Armando Iannucci and Creator/SteveCoogan, the actor who portrays him), the book tells Partridge's life and backstory from his perspective, fleshing out the character's backstory and acting as a PerspectiveFlip on significant moments from Partridge's various appearances on radio and television shows such as ''Series/TheDayToday'', ''Radio/KnowingMeKnowingYouWithAlanPartridge'' and ''Series/ImAlanPartridge''. The book thus makes heavy use of the UnreliableNarrator, as the dedicated viewer (or even not-so-dedicated viewer, really) of these shows will notice that there are many significant differences between them versus how Partridge retroactively presents himself when looking back on them.
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9	The book received a follow-up, ''Nomad'', in 2016. Once again a parody of celebrity-related literature -- this time celebrity travelogues, specifically ones which hinge on some kind of narrative gimmick -- this time it involves Alan, after discovering a box of his father's old belongings in his attic, deciding to recreate a journey his father once took from Norwich to the nuclear power planet at Dungeness in Kent for a job interview. This, naturally, leads to all kinds of chaos for Alan, a chance for him to reflect in a rather self-serving fashion on his past, and the (very remote) possibility of a television spin-off [[BlatantLies that he doesn't care about being made in the slightest]].
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11	----
12	!!''I, Partridge'' provides examples of:
13	* AbusiveParents: While it's likely that Mr. and Mrs. Partridge were not the best parents if the way their son turned out is anything to go by, Alan is clearly exaggerating just how abusive they were. [[SuspiciouslySpecificDenial It's not just because he's cynically trying to tap into the 'misery-lit' market, though.]]
14	* AttentionDeficitOohShiny: Young Alan goes to see his prospective father in law to get permission to marry, but is so engrossed by a brand new Flymo that he forgets to ask.
15	* BadBoss: Although he tries to cast himself as (and seems to genuinely believe himself to be) a BenevolentBoss, even if you've never seen the TV show it's quite clear that Alan is an inept, stingy, bullying and thoughtless boss to his assistant. His employees at his production company don't appear to have come off any better either.
16	* BadLiar: Although the book works better if you've seen Partridge's previous appearances (in ''Radio/KnowingMeKnowingYouWithAlanPartridge'' and ''Series/ImAlanPartridge'' especially), even if you haven't it's still immediately clear that Partridge is shamelessly and feebly trying to make himself look better than he in fact was.
17	* BlatantLies: About 33% of the book is Partridge rewriting the past to make himself look good. Another 33% of the book is Partridge, where even ''he'' can't get away with doing the former, insisting that he's fine with how things turned out even if they turned out completely disastrously. And the rest is Alan being a blinkered, self-obsessed and moronic {{Jerkass}}.
18	* BreakingTheFourthWall: Some of the photos in the insert have captions supplied by the photo agency they were purchased from, so that, for one example, a photo of Alan "addressing a room of teenagers at an event promoting careers in the Norfolk media" is labeled as Steve Coogan appearing in-character at the Brit Awards. At least Alan's performance with Elton John at the British Comedy Awards has an in-universe explanation.
19	* BrickJoke: The beginning of the novel has Alan complaining about how the publishers wouldn't fork out to produce a CD of tracks to listen to during reading. Later in the novel, Alan demonstrates that he appears to have absolutely no understanding of the concept of music royalties. Securing the royalties for all the songs on his track-list would have been prohibitively expensive.
20	* BroadStrokes: The book treats ''On The Hour'' and ''Series/TheDayToday'' with this; it's established that Alan worked as a sports reporter for these shows, and some of the other main characters are mentioned, but the more surreal and absurdist elements of both shows are downplayed as they look increasingly out of place in the more naturalistic (if still comedic and absurd) world that Alan has gradually come to inhabit.
21	* ButtMonkey: Alan's assistant Lynn. Apparently, ''Series/ImAlanPartridge'' actually ''downplays'' just what a huge bell-end he is towards her. To add insult to injury, he doesn't even refer to her by name throughout the entire book (although she is given a cursory mention in the acknowledgements). It gets even worse in ''Nomad'', wherein Alan ends up going out of his way not to have to name her, including when he's quoting himself using her name when talking to her.
22	* CaptainObvious: Alan is constantly spelling out blindingly obvious points, facts, and [[CaptainObviousAesop lessons]] to his reader in a way that makes him seem both condescending and stupid.
23	* CatchPhrase: Alan discusses the origins (such as they are) of his chat-show bellow "Ah-HAAAA!", while simultaneously not-so-convincingly claiming that it ''hasn't'' become an albatross around his neck and that he's perfectly okay with people yelling it at him to try and get a rise out of him. He also ends many a gloating anecdote which ends with him on top after a confrontation with someone else with "Needless to say, I had the last laugh."
24	* ComicallyMissingThePoint: Alan, constantly.
25	** It takes him an absurd amount of time sifting through mind-bogglingly obvious clues -- including people ''outright telling him'' -- to figure out that his wife is having an affair with her fitness instructor.
26	** The book continues a RunningGag from the series where Alan completely fails to get the point of various pop songs, even when it's really obvious. To wit, as part of the reading experience, he includes a track-list at the back with various songs that are to be played when reading several key moments from his life. Several of these songs are ill-chosen at best.
27	** In discussing ''Knowing Me, Knowing You'', he comments that Tony Hayers sent him various notes about the show after the first episode aired -- and then, when they were ignored, sent the same notes week after week. Then, when the notes stopped coming, Alan concluded that it must be because he's doing such a good job.
28	** He describes a moment early on in his career around the time of Gulf War 1, where he happens to find himself seated on a train opposite a young veteran who has lost his leg. After a few moments, the carriage bursts out into spontaneous applause. In a perfect illustration of his self-absorbed vanity, it takes Alan a week to realize that the applause wasn't for him.
29	*** What really makes this stand out is that it's probably the most self-awareness he displays in the entire book.
30	** In general, he tends to react to people laughing at him behind his back or displaying their dislike for him either by assuming they're just amazed and impressed by how brilliant he is or completely misunderstanding why they might possibly dislike him.
31	*** And people's utter indifference to him leaving a job or moving on he interprets as stoicism in the face of such an emotional moment.
32	** He titles the chapter about his encounter with a stalker (which itself he embellishes as an action-movie fight, when he just ran away) "Proof That the Public Loved Me."
33	** It's hard to tell whether he genuinely believes that his radio station going from the FM, region-spanning Radio Norwich to the digital-only, region-very-specific North Norfolk Digital is a good thing, or whether he's just putting on a brave face. Either is possible.
34	** When he's clearly forgotten his anniversary but is instead mortified to think that he's missed preparing his costume for the Royal Norfolk Show, "a Partridge family tradition".
35	** Constantly flitting around different local radio jobs in his early days he imagines as climbing a chain of command (rather than temping or even being dismissed).
36	* DaddyHadAGoodReasonForAbandoningYou: Subverted; Alan is clearly not a very good husband to his wife or father to his children (and in particular treats his daughter as something of an afterthought), but his only justification for this is that he was trying to build a television career. Of course, in his mind, that's a ''perfectly'' good reason. He also includes a self-written letter purportedly from his wife (or at she at least allegedly agreed to being published[[note]]she didn't respond when he forwarded it to her, which he interpreted as consent -- it's far more likely that she simply didn't bother to read it, didn't feel it worth dignifying with a response, or that she simply never received it[[/note]]) which basically absolves him of blame on this score for these very reasons.
37	* {{Defictionalisation}}: It closely resembles Alan's autobiography 'Bouncing Back' which appeared prominently in Series 2 but was never produced in real life. Most likely, it was released due to fan demand for the defictionalisation of ''Bouncing Back''. There's a nod to this in the book, with a footnote that suggests that Alan at one point tried to self-plagiarise large slabs from ''Bouncing Back'' to avoid having to write new material.
38	* DontExplainTheJoke: Alan will often explain to the reader that he's using a particular technique in order to get a particular reaction, which consequently ruins both.
39	* EveryoneIsJesusInPurgatory: An in-universe example. Alan is ''constantly'' reading way too much into not just what people say, but how they say it, the way they shake hands, nod their heads, and so forth. In many cases, it's clearly a desperate attempt to latch on to even the smallest sign, no matter how tenuous, that the person he's talking to likes him, thinks he's the best thing ever, wants to make a television show with him in it, and so forth. Also often overlaps with ComicallyMissingThePoint, since in hyper-focussing on these quasi-imagined clues regarding the person's positive attitudes towards him he's usually overlooking or ignoring far more obvious clues indicating that their real feelings towards him are anything ''but'' positive.
40	* FailedAttemptAtDrama: Alan tries to stage his confrontation with his wife over her infidelity as if it were a scene out of a soap opera, but his failed attempt at smashing a wine glass, her general indifference to him and Bill Oddie of all people showing up at an inopportune moment (to collect the binoculars Alan borrowed from him) serve to leech away any dramatic effect he might have been going for.
41	* FootnoteFever: Alan suffers a very bad case of this.
42	* FreudianExcuse: Played with. Alan's status as an UnreliableNarrator means that it's hard to determine precisely how much of his recounting of his unhappy childhood can be taken at face value, but even allowing for his exaggeration and BlatantLies he does appear to have been rather starved of affection as a child. His relationship with his father appears to have been a bit tense (although the man was probably not as abusive as he makes out) and it seems that he genuinely did both have difficulty making friends and suffered a lot of bullying as a boy. Though the question then becomes how much of this he brought upon himself, as the genuinely unlikeable qualities he possesses as an adult appear to have manifested from a rather early age.
43	* HypocriticalHumour: A significant part of the book:
44	** One chapter focusses on the time he shot Forbes [=McAllister=] dead live on air during an interview. At the beginning, he asserts that he has to take full and complete responsibility for what happened and how he can't just dismiss it. Every single word of the chapter from that point on is him either pointing out reasons why it's not his fault or reasons why it was on the whole probably a good thing that Forbes [=McAllister=] died.
45	** Alan also tends to reverse his opinions back and forth throughout the novel, sometimes within the same chapter or even within a few paragraphs of each other. In particular, his opinion on the BBC and whether or not he'd like to work there tends to fluctuate depending on whether or not he's dealing with a section of his life where the BBC has bruised his ego in some way (usually by quite rightfully denying him television work).
46	* {{Irony}}: A meta-example. At the beginning of the chapter dealing with his life after the collapse of his TV show and his marriage, he remarks that not a lot of people know that he once lived in a travel tavern for over six months. Of course, the reader probably knows all about this since [[Series/ImAlanPartridge they've likely seen it on television]].
47	* {{Jerkass}}: Alan.
48	* NeverMyFault: Naturally, whenever Alan is faced with a disastrous situation from his life that he can't just blatantly lie about, he inevitably tries to weasel out of responsibility by latching onto any lame reason to blame someone else.
49	* NoSympathyForGrudgeholders: Invoked. While Alan appears to have genuine reasons to feel bitter towards his childhood bullies, the fact that he apparently continues to [[StalkerWithoutACrush borderline-stalk]] them fifty years on and clearly, despite his denials, obsessively compares his life and theirs rather than just moving on with his life does not reflect particularly well on him.
50	* NoodleIncident: Alan is very cagey about the exact circumstances of his mother's passing, which required a coroner's inquest, a closed-casket funeral and some soul-searching about what exactly she liked to get up to in her private life.
51	* {{Novelisation}}: Not a straight example, as it's more of a fictionalised autobiography, but the book reimagines events and, in some cases, specific scenes from shows like ''Series/TheDayToday'', ''Series/KnowingMeKnowingYouWithAlanPartridge'', ''Series/ImAlanPartridge'' and ''Mid-Morning Matters with Alan Partridge'' from Alan's perspective.
52	* ParentalNeglect: Although Alan tries to spin his relationship with his parents as one of dramatic abuse, reading between the lines suggests that it was actually closer to a vaguely benevolent sense of general indifference towards him.
53	* PerspectiveFlip: The book retells several key points from Alan's life from his point of view. They are accordingly distorted.
54	* PetTheDog: There are a few -- very few -- moments which suggest a slightly less dickish side to Alan. As an example, after all the trouble that he and Glen Ponder had in ''Series/KnowingMeKnowingYouWithAlanPartridge'' the two have apparently buried the hatchet and become friends, albeit with Alan's usual ineptness when it comes to friendship.
55	* PlagiarismInFiction: At one point, Alan copies huge chunks of the Wikipedia article on [[ItMakesSenseInContext frequency modulation]]. He also appears to have tried self-plagiarism by shoving in large sections of his book ''Bouncing Back'' from ''Series/ImAlanPartridge'' when discussing his Toblerone addiction.
56	* RunningGag:
57	** Whenever Alan has a new show, he systematically wants to call it "Alan's Show", before being told by his bosses that it's a bad idea.
58	** In the audiobook version, whenever Alan mentions his show on North Norfolk Digital he tries to plug the show by throwing in the show's tagline (North Norfolk's best music mix!), but keeps forgetting to add the 'North' and having to correct himself.
59	** He's clearly very fond / proud of a metaphor he comes up with regarding his thoughts tumbling "like a pair of sneakers in a washing machine", since he keeps referring back to it.
60	* SeriousBusiness:
61	** Alan treats and tries to depict his over-indulgence on Toblerones following the total collapse of his career as if it were a gritty heroin addiction rather than the minor eating disorder it so clearly was.
62	** Schoolboy Alan definitely took the business of being a Scout far too seriously, describing 'rank insubordination' and shouting "I AM YOUR PATROL LEADER!" over and over at a troublemaker.
63	* SlowClap: In Alan's retelling, his final meeting with Tony Hayers in which he is informed that he's not getting a second series of his chat show ends with him delivering a withering put-down to Tony (or at least what Alan ''considers'' to be a withering put-down) and exiting the BBC restaurant to thunderous applause of this nature from everyone around him "like in a really good movie". In [[Series/ImAlanPartridge reality]] it ended with him throwing a tantrum, assaulting Tony with a block of cheese he'd impaled on a fork and running out screeching "I'VE GOT CHEESE!", while everyone around him watched in bemusement.
64	* SmugSnake: Alan.
65	* StalkerWithACrush: At one point Partridge mentions that after his divorce he spent a lot of time eating his lunch outside the gym where his wife had an affair with her fitness instructor. He apparently failed to notice anything creepy about this.
66	* StalkerWithoutACrush: Despite his repeated insistence that he's completely over the torment he got from his childhood bullies and has "forgotten all about it", Partridge seems to know a remarkable amount about where they live (one of the photos in the book is of a semi-detached house "much like the one my childhood nemesis Steven [=McCombe=] lives in", and he mentions a confrontation with the wife of one of them after 'coincidentally' stopping outside their house), what they do for a living, who they're married to, and even in some cases their ability to drive.
67	* StylisticSuck: Alan constantly loses his train of thought, switches between tenses and writing styles, explains what he's doing to the reader as he's doing it, latches on to trivial and insignificant details while completely ignoring the main point of what he's supposed to be talking about, introduces irrelevant tangents solely to boost up his word count, interrupts his narrative because he's remembered something he should have mentioned earlier, and so forth. His editors don't seem to have been that great either, since he's left in large notes for them to check something which have been ignored and left in.
68	* SuspiciouslySpecificDenial: When Partridge isn't coming up with BlatantLies, he's offering preemptive denials for why what happened either didn't happen or doesn't make him a bad person if it did.
69	* UnreliableNarrator: To a truly jaw-dropping degree if you're familiar with the TV series. To hear Partridge tell it, humiliating disasters and embarrassments become glorious triumphs and moral victories. A good rule of thumb is that any time Alan insists that he's fine with how something turned out, he's not; if he claims something that happened wasn't a problem for him, it was; and if he maintains that something ended up being a glorious triumph for him, it didn't.
70	* UnsympatheticComedyProtagonist: The book manages the achievement of making Alan seem ''worse'' than he does on TV at times (which is really saying something). His every desperate attempt to convince the reader that he's a likeable and sympathetic guy will usually just further convince them of how utterly loathsome and repellent he truly is.
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72	!!''Nomad'' provides examples of:
73	* BlatantLies: Once again, Alan does not appear to be a trustworthy account of his experiences. In one chapter, he has a conversation with a homeless man who, despite apparently not being very familiar with television to the extent of having never heard of the ''The One Show'', suddenly becomes an expert on behind-the-scenes production (including terminology such as "proof-of-concept") when discussing whether Alan's experiences are worth making into a television show. The chapters focusing on ''Film/AlanPartridgeAlphaPapa'' also tend to present a rather skewed and nakedly dishonest version of what the reader almost certainly has already seen.
74	* BringMyBrownPants: In his reflections on the radio station hostage situation, Alan gets some revenge on the other men who were present (who all apparently managed to profitise the event much more successfully) by claiming that they spend the bulk of the crisis voiding themselves loudly and disgustingly. As in, according to Alan they literally spent hours just shitting their pants.
75	* CaptainObviousAesop: An in-universe example, played for laughs; Alan opens the book by explaining to the reader at length ''why walking is useful'', as if there's anyone out there arguing otherwise.
76	* ComicallyMissingThePoint: Alan's whole journey in the novel is made of this. When informed that most {{Travelogue Show}}s are built around some kind of historically or personally significant journey for the host, he comes up with a journey to an unsuccessful job interview his dad once made. He decides to turn it into a walk when naturally his dad drove there, meaning that a journey that took only a handful of hours originally ends up taking two weeks. When preparing, he decides to go swimming for exercise instead of walking because he hates walking, and buys a ridiculously and impractically large camping rucksack for a minor walking journey when he's planning on staying in bed-and-breakfasts anyway. And so on.
77	* DaddyIssues: More than the previous work, this book focuses on Alan's difficult relationship with his father. Though given the UnreliableNarrator, precisely ''how'' difficult it was is hard to determine; Alan certainly has a lot of bitterness towards the man and paints him as a borderline monster, but reading between the lines and adjusting for the fact that Alan cannot be trusted to accurately recount anything about his life suggests that the man probably was a bit of a {{Jerkass}} but was nowhere near the kind of abuser Alan tries to depict him as.
78	* TheDeterminator: Played with. Alan is determined to see out his trip come what may, but only because he's deluded himself into thinking he can spin it into a lucrative TV and book contract with associated merchandising. Once even he is forced to accept that this isn't going to happen, and has suffered both an unnecessary 120 mile diversion to Gatwick Airport ''and'' a cut on his foot from broken glass that is becoming increasingly infected, he's clearly having second thoughts but forces himself to persevere. However, he only keeps going because he realises that, having boasted about it to everyone he knew, they're now expecting him to complete it and he'll be even more of a laughing stock if he gives up.
79	* DidNotThinkThisThrough: Alan's walking trip is poorly planned, and tends to resulting in a cascading effect of unfortunate results for himself. For example, he initially buys an expensive large camping backpack for himself because it's the top-range option available, not stopping to consider that it's impractically large and heavy for his purposes and unnecessary given how he's not even camping. He then hits on the idea of sending the backpack ahead to his resting points, only to eventually realise that frequent short-range courier payments make this impractically expensive for his entire journey. He does barely any long-distance walking to train himself. He engages on long and pointless tangential detours without stopping to consider the fact that he's only got a limited amount of time to reach his destination before he has to be back at work. And of course, there's the fact that for some reason (mostly likely so that he can pad out his proposed TravelogueShow) he's decided to make a long walk out of a journey that takes about three hours to make by car when he apparently doesn't even like walking anyway. Even Alan outright admits that he "can't remember why" he felt it necessary to make the project a walk.
80	* MyFriendsAndZoidberg: Alan brings up the siege from ''Film/AlanPartridgeAlphaPapa'' a few times and mentions how relieved he was that no one got seriously hurt, each time adding, usually in a footnote, "except for Michael, who died." In fairness, Michael wasn't killed as a result of the siege so much as his own SenselessSacrifice jumping off a pier, and they NeverFoundTheBody anyway.
81	* NeverMyFault: As with the previous book there's bucketloads of Alan trying to shift responsibility for his own failures and disasters onto others. One notable example comes when after his final disastrous meeting with Harvey Kennedy has made it abundantly clear that "Footsteps of My Fathers" will end up nowhere near a television screen, he's sulking in a cafe reflecting on how he's needlessly gone out of his way on a 120 mile diversion around central London "based on reassurances that were not fulfilled". Needless to say, these 'reassurances' didn't exist anywhere outside of Alan's own self-deluded skull.
82	* NoodleIncident: A half-page description of Alan's visit to a Scientology compound is mostly redacted aside from a handful of bizarrely chosen words, including "needless to say" and "last laugh."
83	* {{Novelisation}}: Less so than ''I, Partridge'', as it's more of an original novel based around Alan's attempts at starting a TravelogueShow, but the novel does adapt some scenes from ''Film/AlanPartridgeAlphaPapa'', which hadn't been released when the previous book was published.
84	* RunningGag: Alan spitefully abusing [=TripAdvisor=] to attack the owners of the bed-and-breakfasts that he stays in whenever they do anything to annoy him.
85	* ShaggyDogStory: It should come as no surprise that Alan's walk eventually ends up as this. [[spoiler: Alan goes on a ridiculously long diversion across Central London out of desperation to meet Harvey Kennedy, only to end up getting drunk beforehand and humiliating himself. This means that his walk is decisively not going to end up on television (not that it was to begin with), and although he eventually does manage to make it to the perimeter fence of the nuclear power plant, he finally collapses due to his injured foot before he can make it all the way.]]
86	* SuspiciouslySpecificDenial: As with the previous book, there are ''buckets'' of this trope. In particular, Alan certainly isn't just doing this walk as a cynical and thinly-veiled attempt to recapture the limelight by spinning it into a six-episode mini-series shown on BBC 1 with an accompanying book deal and merchandising, and he honestly just wishes you'd let it go (despite the fact that he's the only one who ever brings it up and is the only one who ''can'', given that he's writing a book). He's also not bothered in the least that high-powered agent Harvey Kennedy won't return his calls on the subject, and only takes a 120 mile diversion off his route to first try to visit his house and then ambush him at Gatwick Airport because it's convenient. And, of course, he's naturally entirely happy with his trip[=/=]life in general despite how dismal and disastrous it is. Needless to say, pretty much any time Alan insists that everything's fine, he's having a super time and that he's perfectly happy with the way things are or have turned out, you can assume the exact opposite.
87	* TravelogueShow: The book itself revolves around "Footsteps of My Father", an attempt by Alan to recreate a journey his father once took for a job interview as a walk, with the barely-concealed despite-his-protests longing to have the BBC make it into one of these.
88	* UnreliableNarrator: Once again, Alan proves a less-than-trustworthy source on the subject of his life and past, including things we saw for ourselves. A standout case is when he talks about the siege from ''Film/AlanPartridgeAlphaPapa'' and claims that Simon knocked himself out with the fire extinguisher (which was of course Alan's doing in the movie). There are also entirely valid questions to be asked about how much of Alan's walking journey actually occurred in the way he tells it.
89	* WisdomFromTheGutter: At a low point, Alan meets Brian, a homeless man who apparently gives him morale support. [[SubvertedTrope And then nicks all Alan's stuff once he falls asleep.]]

Context Literature / IPartridgeWeNeedToTalkAboutAlan