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Books : Life Interrupted: The Unfinished MonologueIn association with Amazon.comby: Spalding Gray  List Price: $19.95 Amazon.com's Price: $13.57 You Save: $6.38 (32%)Prices subject to change. Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
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Binding: HardcoverDewey Decimal Number: 812.54 EAN: 9781400048618 ISBN: 1400048613 Label: Crown Manufacturer: Crown Number Of Items: 1 Number Of Pages: 256 Publication Date: October 04, 2005 Publisher: Crown Release Date: October 04, 2005 Studio: Crown Sales Rank: 161036 Related Items:
Editorial Review: Product Description: As the first decade of the new century was getting underway, Spalding Gray worried that the joy he’d finally found with his wife, stepdaughter, and two sons would fail to fuel his work as a theatrical monologist the way anxiety, conflict, doubt, and various crises once had. Before he got the chance to find out, however, an automobile accident in Ireland left him with the lasting wounds of body and spirit that ultimately led him to take his own life. But as his dear friend novelist Francine Prose notes in this volume’s foreword, “Even when his depression became so severe that he was barely able to hold a simple conversation, he was, miraculously, able to perform.” As was always his method, Gray began to fashion a new monologue in various workshop settings that would tell the story of the accident and its aftermath. Originally titled Black Spot—for what the locals called the section of highway where Gray’s accident occurred—it began as a series of workshops at P.S. 122 in New York City and eventually became Life Interrupted.Gray died in early 2004, and though never completed, Life Interrupted is rich with brave self-revelation, masterfully acute observations of wonderfully peculiar people, penetrating wit and genuine humor, an irresolvable fascination with life and death, and all the other attributes of Gray’s singular and unmistakable voice. In the final performance of Life Interrupted, Gray read two additional pieces: a short story about a day he spent with his son Theo at the carousel in Central Park and a brief, poignant love letter to New York City that he wrote after the terrorist attacks in 2001. This volume includes these pieces as well as many of the eulogies that were delivered by his friends and family at memorial services held at Lincoln Center and in Sag Harbor. [If you had to reduce all of Spalding’s work to its essence, its core, 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 that we are someday going to die. . . . If there is a consolation, it’s what he left behind: the children whom he so loved and, of course, his work. Reading the unfinished pieces in this volume . . . we hear his voice again and feel the happiness we felt when he sat on stage behind his wooden desk, took a sip from his water glass, transformed the raw material of his life into art, and the crowd applauded each brilliant, beautiful sentence.] —Francine Prose, from the Foreword Also available as an eBook Average Rating:
 Rating:  - A loss for all of usMy 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 ... Read More Rating: - A beautiful swan song for a loving man, husband, father & human.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 ... Read More Rating: - If you liked his other works, you'll love this fast read.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 could see hear his monotone stories gain, telling me of his life, and taking me to that wonderful place that only he and old radio dramas could. Rating: - Spalding gives us something to think about, and departs.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 ... Read More Rating:  - It's really only 56 pages.When I saw that it was 256 pages I thought it was all going to be stuff that Spalding Gray had written. I was really excited to get this book, thinking that I'd have at least a few days worth of reading to do. Unfortunately only 56 of those 256 pages are actually his work. The forward by Francine Prose goes from pg 17-49. "Life Interrupted" goes from pgs 53-92 (40 pages). "The Anniversary" goes from pgs 95-109 (15 pages). "Dear New York City" is pg 113. The rest of the book, pgs 121-255, are eulogies. ... Read More Browse for similar items by category:
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