Customer Reviews

The Smoking Diaries

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This book was a huge bestseller in England and spawned a couple of sequels. The author, Simon Gray, is a well-known British playwright (of course, he's unheard of in the United States). Gray is very witty and his diaries constitute the perfect companion for anyone growing old but not only unwilling to go gently into that good night but instead thoroughly willing to give the good night a boffing about the bollocks. Oh, there's a lot of smoking in this book--as the title suggests--so if you find that objectionable, well, please feel free to go willingly away.

Simon Gray is at the end. His friends are ill or dying, he is ill and dying - HAS now died. All is crumbling and fragmenting in a tumult of despair and decay. But there is great bravery and humour aplenty in these memoirs as Simon Gray documents a year in his life replete with digressions that shed light on the rich treasure trove of his mind.

There are superb riffs on the friends and strangers he encounters, holidays he takes, books he is reading - books he wishes he was reading instead, memories of his childhood sexual awakenings via American crime writer Hank Janson, reflections on various points of his life since and grim projections into his highly curtailed future.

The stories are fantastic. Such as the tale of a chain smoking alcoholic friend whose wife, on his deathbed, forced a glass of whisky and a lit cigarette into each hand 'if photographed, it could serve as the ghastliest of warnings - look what I have done'. And a vignette from a train journey in Suffolk when he encounters what he takes to be a psychopathic murderer but is just an aimiable gentleman trying to reclaim his newspaper which the author has taken.

Ditch those tedious memoirs from whiny American affluenza riddled losers who write about how they messed up their lives through drugs and got them back together again, and pick up Gray's memoirs (many more in the series than this) which show how rich the form can be when put in the hands of a wily old English writer with plenty of wit and interests in life.

The book was excellent, dealing with issues related to the end of life. It arrived in good physical condition.