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For all its seeming straightforwardness, Gray's confessional enterprise raised thorny questions about the nature of autobiographical performance. One of the things that kept his audience coming back was the mixture of revelation and reserve, self-lacerating candor and self-mocking comedy the low-key New England native employed. How much of Gray's art was a transcription of reality, and how much was a refraction or deflection, a carefully cultivated fiction packaged as the 'truth'? Now, in a book sure to be carefully sifted for fresh evidence, The Journals of Spalding Gray add another provocative layer to the story. Selected by Nell Casey from some 5,000 pages, these edited entries begin in 1967, when the 25-year-old Gray was working as a regional theater actor in Houston. They end in 2003, as he spiraled toward suicide. Gray died in 2004, after an apparent jump from the Staten Island Ferry. Casey supplies useful and well-made narrative bridges. The result is a kind of memoir in frag

The publication of The Journals of Spalding Gray is a significant event in American arts and letters. If Walt Whitman was our great chronicler of American life toward the end of the 19th century, Gray was his ironic, darkly funny counterpart. He did more than anyone else to record what it was like to be human--achingly human--in the urban America of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. This is not only a great book, it's an important book. <br>--Michael Cunningham, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Hours and By Nightfall <br> <br> The Journals of Spalding Gray tell an important story that is painful to read but hard to put down. They bring you into a mind that is original and uncensoring even as it careens off the rails into destruction. Gray's complex moods, dark imagination and wit are often disturbing and deeply moving. <br>--Kay Redfield Jamison, author of An Unquiet Mind

Author Information

Spalding Gray was born and raised in Rhode Island. A cofounder of the acclaimed New York City theater company the Wooster Group, he appeared on Broadway and in numerous films, including Roland Joffe's The Killing Fields, David Byrne's True Stories, Garry Marshall's Beaches, and as the subject of the 2010 Steven Soderbergh documentary, And Everything Is Going Fine. His monologues include Sex and Death to the Age 14, Swimming to Cambodia, Monster in a Box, Gray's Anatomy, and It's a Slippery Slope. He died in 2004. Nell Casey is the editor of the national best seller Unholy Ghost: Writers on Depression and An Uncertain Inheritance: Writers on Caring for Family, which won a Books for a Better Life Award. Her articles and essays have been published in T he New York Times, The Washington Post, Slate, Elle, and Glamour, among other publications. Her fiction has been published in One Story. She is a founding member of Stories at the Moth, a nonprofit storytelling foundation. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two children.

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