You may know Carl Hiaasen for his fiction (both adult and young adult) or for his work as a journalist. In “The Downhill Lie: A Hacker's Return to a Ruinous Sport,” he tackles memoir, and he does so in classic Hiaasen style -- with a twisted sense of humor. The book starts with Hiaasen’s return to golf in the summer of 2005, “after a much needed layoff of thirty-two years.” Traveling back in time, he relives his “first taste of golf” as a shag caddy for his father at eleven or twelve years old. In high school, he played weekend rounds with friends at a course surrounded by retirement developments. Looking back on that period, he recalls: “Despite the trampled fairways and corrugated greens, I actually started enjoying myself  -- the mood was loose and raunchy, and it was uplifting to discover that my friends stroked the ball as erratically as I did.”

The good times lasted only so long. At twenty, Hiaasen threw in the towel, self-aware enough to admit that maybe golf just wasn’t his thing. Decades later, he falls prey to a desire to show up his younger self, confessing that his comeback is due to the fact that he’s “one sick bastard.” The anecdotes he records in a 577-day diary during this period grow increasingly and absurdly comical. He loses a golf cart in a pond, uses a golf club to combat a rodent with a “long, twitchy black tail,” and enters somewhat pathetic territory when, watching an infomercial, he becomes mesmerized by a pendant said to “hold marvelous powers.” Whether you’re an avid golfer or not, you’ll likely relate on some level to the riveting “man versus self” battle at the core of this book, laughing all the while. Listen here for an excerpt.