Spalding Gray's Last Work, "Life Interrupted," Published by Crown
By Robert Simonson
24 Oct 2005
"Life Interrupted," the final work by Spalding Gray, the monologuist par excellence who committed suicide in early 2004, has been published by Crown.
The title refers to the monologue Gray was working on at the time of his death. (The book's full title is "Life Interrupted: The Unfinished Monologue.") He performed the piece in bits and pieces in various workshops, but never presented the finished product.
The work concerns a traumatic automobile accident Gray experienced while vacationing in Ireland in 2001, and the hospital stay that followed. The incident left him severely depressed and in considerable pain, despite a series of operations—effects that eventually led to his jumping off the Staten Island ferry at the age of 62.
The book also includes an introduction by novelist Francine Prose and short eulogies by his agent, Suzanne Gluck; novelist A.M. Homes; essayist Roger Rosenblatt; performance artist Laurie Anderson; John Perry Barlow; actor and playwright Eric Bogosian; and actor Eric Stoltz. Some of the eulogies were delivered at Gray's Manhattan memorial service.
Prose's intro reads, in part, "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 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?"
The book runs 256 pages and is priced at $19.99.
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