<![CDATA[Life Interrupted: The Unfinished Monologue]]>

false <![CDATA[Life Interrupted: The Unfinished Monologue]]> http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1169110735m/38303.jpg 38303 2 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 182170 4 10 2005 Life Interrupted: The Unfinished Monologue total:67|5:12|4:24|3:21|2:9|1:1| 67 238 100 17 4 0 false false Tue Mar 03 00:00:00 -0800 2009 Thu Mar 05 07:29:46 -0800 2009 Thu Mar 05 07:36:43 -0800 2009 1 more...]]> 2 0 false false Tue May 19 13:15:21 -0700 2009 Tue May 26 08:27:50 -0700 2009 more...]]> 4 0 false false Thu Jan 01 00:00:00 -0800 2009 Tue Jan 27 13:28:36 -0800 2009 Tue Jan 27 13:30:58 -0800 2009 more...]]> 3 0 false false Sun Jan 01 00:00:00 -0800 2006 Tue Jun 03 18:17:52 -0700 2008 Sat Jun 28 05:26:26 -0700 2008
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But it'll still make you cry, if you're in the vein. If you're tired and unhappy and angry at him for stepping over that rail. Goddamit, Spalding. He once said he never wanted children, he just wanted to be...more...]]> 3 0 false false Fri Feb 01 00:00:00 -0800 2008 Fri Jul 10 13:21:50 -0700 2009 Fri Jul 10 13:21:50 -0700 2009 5 0 false false Fri Jul 27 19:42:50 -0700 2007 Sat Jul 28 19:20:56 -0700 2007 more...]]> 3 0 false false Sat Aug 01 00:00:00 -0700 2009 Fri Jul 10 18:38:40 -0700 2009 Sun Aug 16 18:06:11 -0700 2009 2 0 true false Fri May 23 07:27:06 -0700 2008 Tue Jun 24 08:30:14 -0700 2008 3 0 false false Tue May 15 19:12:43 -0700 2007 Tue May 15 19:13:42 -0700 2007 3 0 false false Sat May 03 00:00:00 -0700 2008 Sat May 03 22:52:26 -0700 2008 Sat May 03 22:55:46 -0700 2008 4 0 false false Wed Nov 01 00:00:00 -0800 2006 Wed May 30 18:04:43 -0700 2007 Wed May 30 18:04:43 -0700 2007 Life Interrupted: The Unfinished Monologue review]]> 4 0 false false Sat Jun 16 20:32:32 -0700 2007 Sun Jun 17 14:30:23 -0700 2007 4 0 false false Wed Apr 30 00:00:00 -0700 2008 Sun Apr 27 09:11:24 -0700 2008 Wed Apr 30 14:31:50 -0700 2008 0 0 false false Fri Nov 06 14:28:07 -0800 2009 Fri Nov 06 14:28:11 -0800 2009 5 0 false false Tue Nov 03 22:27:37 -0800 2009 Tue Nov 03 22:27:37 -0800 2009 5 0 false false Fri Sep 25 18:45:47 -0700 2009 Fri Sep 25 18:45:47 -0700 2009 http://www.goodreads.com/book_link/follow/8?book_id=38303