Knopf, October 2011
While reading The Journals of Spalding Gray, a single aphoristic phrase popped into my head repeatedly: “I’m not much, but I’m all I think about.” Though not attributable to Spalding Gray, it may as well be. The writer and actor of Swimming to Cambodia and Monster in a Box was famous for speaking extensively about his fears and insecurities before audiences. He didn’t invent the monologue but he was perhaps the art form's most notable practitioner at the turn of the century.
The middle of three brothers, Spalding Gray was raised by a distant, alcoholic father and a mother who struggled with mental illness and committed suicide when Gray was 26. After college, Gray moved to New York where he began a short theater career which helped him find his voice as a monologist. He performed his first solo show, Sex and Death to the Age 14, in 1979, but it wasn't until 1983, when Gray first performed Swimming to Cambodia, a monologue about his role in the Roland Joffe movie, The Killing Fields, that Gray met with critical acclaim.
Jonathan Demme made Swimming to Cambodia into a movie in 1987, exponentially expanding Gray's audience overnight and turning him into a celebrity. His subsequent monologues - Terrors of Pleasure, Monster in a Box, and Gray's Anatomy were all made into movies, each of which a one man show starring Spalding Gray, typically seated behind a desk, telling the stories of his life as only he could.
While reading The Journals of Spalding Gray, a single aphoristic phrase popped into my head repeatedly: “I’m not much, but I’m all I think about.” Though not attributable to Spalding Gray, it may as well be. The writer and actor of Swimming to Cambodia and Monster in a Box was famous for speaking extensively about his fears and insecurities before audiences. He didn’t invent the monologue but he was perhaps the art form's most notable practitioner at the turn of the century.
The middle of three brothers, Spalding Gray was raised by a distant, alcoholic father and a mother who struggled with mental illness and committed suicide when Gray was 26. After college, Gray moved to New York where he began a short theater career which helped him find his voice as a monologist. He performed his first solo show, Sex and Death to the Age 14, in 1979, but it wasn't until 1983, when Gray first performed Swimming to Cambodia, a monologue about his role in the Roland Joffe movie, The Killing Fields, that Gray met with critical acclaim.
Jonathan Demme made Swimming to Cambodia into a movie in 1987, exponentially expanding Gray's audience overnight and turning him into a celebrity. His subsequent monologues - Terrors of Pleasure, Monster in a Box, and Gray's Anatomy were all made into movies, each of which a one man show starring Spalding Gray, typically seated behind a desk, telling the stories of his life as only he could.
Gray kept personal diaries throughout his life. The Journals of Spalding Gray begins in 1967 when Gray was 25 and contains entries right up until his suicide in 2004. And while Gray's monologues self-deprecatingly betray his various anxieties and self-analysis, the entries from Gray's journals are a no-holds-barred deep dive into the author's boundless self-absorption.
July 13, 1976
I dreamed that I made love to myself. I was in a big house and I walked by and found myself asleep on a couch and I was surprised and happy to find myself and I touched myself to wake me up then I climbed on to myself and began to make love to myself.
In these pages, Gray uninhibitedly expounds upon his sexual experimentation, extra-marital affairs, guilt, fear, and depression. It's dark territory, and one wonders if anyone - much less everyone - was ever expected to tread this ground. But there is evidence in The Journals of Spalding Gray to indicate that he considered the possibility:
July 13, 1976
I dreamed that I made love to myself. I was in a big house and I walked by and found myself asleep on a couch and I was surprised and happy to find myself and I touched myself to wake me up then I climbed on to myself and began to make love to myself.
In these pages, Gray uninhibitedly expounds upon his sexual experimentation, extra-marital affairs, guilt, fear, and depression. It's dark territory, and one wonders if anyone - much less everyone - was ever expected to tread this ground. But there is evidence in The Journals of Spalding Gray to indicate that he considered the possibility:
June 19, 1995
This is a history of the things that are happening to me. I have little more to offer. Maybe someone can live and learn from them. Honesty is the best policy.
Gray's widow, Kathleen Russo, evidently also thought so and she entrusted this work to Nell Casey, an excellent choice as Casey is not only a writer and an editor of a book about depressed writers, but a co-founder of Stories at the Moth, a storytelling foundation for which Gray was undoubtedly an important influence.
On July 3, 1995, Gray wrote that what bothered him about listening to Jack Kerouac read On the Road was that it reminded him of what Gray himself hated about his own writing: “It has no INSIGHT in it. Its reflection is only memory and not memory with insight. It’s like a little boy reporting all this NEWNESS to his Mom and as soon as the newness wears off he’s gone.”
Like the little boy, Spalding Gray was an observer - of the world around him, of other people - mostly he was an observer of himself. But contrary to his assessment above, Gray’s observations were so insightful and so well-told that people came from all over to pay money to hear the man talk about himself.
In 2004, three years after an accident that left him with debilitating brain and eye injuries, Spalding Gray took his own life by throwing himself from the Staten Island Ferry into New York’s East River. With the publication in 2005 of Life Interrupted: The Unfinished Monologue and now of these journal entries, we again are held rapt by the memories reported by this little boy. Mainly because we miss him.
This is a history of the things that are happening to me. I have little more to offer. Maybe someone can live and learn from them. Honesty is the best policy.
Gray's widow, Kathleen Russo, evidently also thought so and she entrusted this work to Nell Casey, an excellent choice as Casey is not only a writer and an editor of a book about depressed writers, but a co-founder of Stories at the Moth, a storytelling foundation for which Gray was undoubtedly an important influence.
On July 3, 1995, Gray wrote that what bothered him about listening to Jack Kerouac read On the Road was that it reminded him of what Gray himself hated about his own writing: “It has no INSIGHT in it. Its reflection is only memory and not memory with insight. It’s like a little boy reporting all this NEWNESS to his Mom and as soon as the newness wears off he’s gone.”
Like the little boy, Spalding Gray was an observer - of the world around him, of other people - mostly he was an observer of himself. But contrary to his assessment above, Gray’s observations were so insightful and so well-told that people came from all over to pay money to hear the man talk about himself.
In 2004, three years after an accident that left him with debilitating brain and eye injuries, Spalding Gray took his own life by throwing himself from the Staten Island Ferry into New York’s East River. With the publication in 2005 of Life Interrupted: The Unfinished Monologue and now of these journal entries, we again are held rapt by the memories reported by this little boy. Mainly because we miss him.
Disclosure: A review copy was provided by the publisher. For more information, please see our Ethics Policy.
