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Life Interrupted: The Unfinished Monologue

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"If you had to reduce all of Spalding's work to its essence, its core," Francine Prose writes in her Foreward to Gray's last major monologue, "if you wanted to locate the subject to which, no matter what else he talked about, he kept returning, I suppose you could say that his work was a profoundly metaphysical inquiry into how we manage to live despite the knowledge we are someday going to die. How are we to love the world and the people we care about most even when we know that someday we will lose it all and our loved ones will have to continue without us" (pp. 43-44)?

Perhaps best known for SWIMMING TO CAMBODIA (1988) and GRAY'S ANATOMY (1994), Spalding Gray committed suicide last year at the age of 62, leaving behind his wife, Kathleen Russo, a stepdaughter, Marissa, and two sons, Forrest and Theo. In his unfinished work in progress, LIFE INTERRUPTED, Gray tells of his trip to Ireland to celebrate his 60th birthday, which ended with a gruesome car crash leaving him severely injured and depressed. That incident not only became the catalyst for Gray's return to writing from his "quiet life" of domestic bliss in Sag Harbor, but the turning point in his life, ultimately leading to suicide. From the transvestite with green fingernails offering him toast and tea (p. 67-68), to his Pakastani doctors, to his attempts to try to get along with the blaring televisions (p. 71), to his musings on how an intelligent country like America could "elect such a dud like George Bush" (p. 80), Gray finds never-ending humor in his grim predicament, while recovering from his injuries in an Irish country hospital. Spalding Gray's parting monologue offers such sweet sorrow.

The book concludes with several short eulogies by Gray's friends (Laurie Anderson, John Perry Barlow, Eric Bogosian, Eric Stoltz and many more), delivered in memorial services at Lincoln Center and in Sag Harbor.

G. Merritt

A celebrity is someone whom you've never actually met, but think you know; not just know about, but know. The celebrity press offers us little bits of enticing, patently untrue information about these imaginary friends every day. Part of our agreement with the idea of celebrity is that we believe these things while knowing (after all, we're not crazy) that they aren't true.

It was easy to slip into thinking of Spalding Gray, who after all never pretended to be anything but an actor and a sort of amateur writer, as a celebrity. Since his confessional monologues included much that was embarrassing and painful, it was easier that way. Apparently, though, every word of it was true. His sadness, his eerily prophetic but still crippling fears, his inability, like so many children of suicides, to get on with his life -- it was all there. It was all, or at least mostly true, and we really knew him after all, and the guilt at not having been able to save him, at having been not an imaginary friend but a real one, and not a very good one, is real as well.

His monologues were surprisingly layered, nuanced and durable works of art, considering he never claimed much for himself as a writer. They are like Chekhov plays without villains -- not so dark, or so funny, and a bit sweeter than you'd like, maybe, but still great, and this is the last of them.

The amount of compassion in this book is simply amazing. Spalding was a normal individual living through extraordinary events that he wove into some of the best monologues & humor to ever grace our eyes & ears. The finality of his decision can never be compromised by our tremendous feeling of loss. He was entitled to save himself from his pain in any manner he sought & I respect him for that. While the hole in our hearts will never be filled, I would only encourage his friends & loved ones to look back on the best of times. I have a feeling He would have wanted it that way too...

Delivery took a very long time. But the Item was great from seller was exactly how it was described. Would buy from seller again but not if I need item quickly.

I've been a great Gray fan for years. Reading this monologe brings you back into the theater with him again. Read on a quick flight to Boston, I was transformed back to his live stage performance reality. His vivid writing lets you see and hear his life again, and taking me to that wonderful place that only he and old radio dramas could.

I have always liked Spalding and as a Irish person was interested on his take on Ireland (even under awful circumstances). But, it was sadly wanting. He did not understand Ireland or the Irish at all. It was the classic "oirish" interpretation of things. Disappointing. The main piece is a very short part of the book, the rest are eulogies of different sorts from his pals. But, the discontinuities between the two pieces lead you to question the latter.

My first thought upon hearing that Spalding Gray was missing was that he could not have killed himself. At the end of "Morning, Noon, and Night," which I was fortunate enough to see him perform in early 2002, he imagined Hell as a state in which one floats, disembodied, able to see and hear others but not touch them or interact with them in any way. This is certainly a different take on "Grandma is watching over you from Heaven." If she is watching over you, it's not from Heaven.

This book contains Gray's final monologue, in which he describes the accident which eventually led to his death. Most of the book, and I suspect, the reason for its publication, consists of recollections of Gray by those who knew him - how he affected them as a friend, colleague, or performer. The most affecting was the one by his step-daughter, who was the only contributor who actually lived with him in his final days. Her admission that maybe everyone was better off without him is born of the ignorance and bluntness of the young, who have not yet learned to dissemble in order to spare the feelings of others. Out of essay after essay celebrating Gray's "honesty," hers was itself the most honest. It must have been quite a different matter to live with him, rather than simply visit, or for those at a sufficiently great distance, to have the luxury of simply recalling how he was before the accident.

We subsequently learned that Gray had attempted suicide several times already. The night he leapt from the ferry was so cold that the deck had been roped off. He must have stepped over the rope and climbed off the railing - unfortunately, not an accident, and not entirely unanticipated. In some sense, his family must have agreed to let him go, as difficult as this is to accept.

Gray's passing, and the events and emotions surrounding it, gave me the idea for a play or story. A great, accomplished, famous, and widely beloved man is suicidally depressed. His family bears the brunt of his care, and is exhausted. They come up with the idea of appealing for help from the legions of his fan base. The idea is, if after someone's death, people will say "if only I could have done something," they now will have the chance to "do something" while he is alive.

At first, the response is overwhelming. Enormous numbers of people volunteer to help. As the great man is shuttled from one to another, however, the volunteers turn out to be grossly self-serving, incompetent, or well-meaning but ill-equipped to deal with his needs and demands. In the end, the family must once again take over, with the inevitable conclusion.

Gray's death was not merely our loss of his wit, his observations, his unique presence in our lives. It was the demonstration of our own inability to prevent it, and our own limitations in the face of life's unbearable sorrow.