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The Smoking Diaries #3
The last cigarette
Book by Gray, Simon
312 pages, Hardcover
First published April 1, 2008
About the author
Simon Gray
138 books12 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.
Simon James Holliday Gray, CBE (21 October 1936 – 7 August 2008) was an English playwright and memoirist who also had a career as a university lecturer in English literature at Queen Mary, University of London, for 20 years. While teaching at Queen Mary, Gray began his writing career as a novelist in 1963 and, during the next 45 years, in addition to 5 published novels, wrote 40 original stage plays, screenplays, and screen adaptations of his own and others' works for stage, film, and television and became well known for the self-deprecating wit characteristic of several volumes of memoirs or diaries
Simon James Holliday Gray, CBE (21 October 1936 – 7 August 2008) was an English playwright and memoirist who also had a career as a university lecturer in English literature at Queen Mary, University of London, for 20 years. While teaching at Queen Mary, Gray began his writing career as a novelist in 1963 and, during the next 45 years, in addition to 5 published novels, wrote 40 original stage plays, screenplays, and screen adaptations of his own and others' works for stage, film, and television and became well known for the self-deprecating wit characteristic of several volumes of memoirs or diaries
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
November 9, 2012
A bright spark Chelsea boy who loved Spetses in Greece. I have been there three times, Simon many. Reading about her, are Islands feminine?, makes me yearn to return.
A wondeful combination of comedy and serious reflection. And to think that he was dying when he wrote it makes it all the more powerful.
A wondeful combination of comedy and serious reflection. And to think that he was dying when he wrote it makes it all the more powerful.
January 25, 2015
The section on New York/Butley was enjoyable but generally I found the book frustrating and at times crushingly dull. I wish there had been more about theatre and writing. Very meandering.
August 16, 2026
This is not a traditional diary, inasmuch as, despite the name, it is not a day by day account of Gray's life. Rather it moves between contemporary accounts of his life (as a recovering alcoholic, but still smoking, playwright and writer) and autobiographical flashbacks, in a somewhat rambling, ramshackle style that is actually very well constructed. The flashbacks are the strongest and most interesting, while the 'diary' sections are more hit and miss. But when he hits, he hits, and while not quite laugh-out-loud, there is enough of interest going here to make me seek out more from Mr. Gray.
July 31, 2017
Felt frivolous in a boring, frivolous way.
July 29, 2024
debating whether i would hate this man if i knew him or whether i would view him like my granddad - crazy sad ending tho if you have context…. obsessed with his obsession with ciggies xx
April 11, 2015
Gray, Simon. The Last Cigarette
This is for the most part an interesting and amusing memoir dealing with Gray’s final two years. Where it finally hits the buffers is in its concluding sequences where the author retells at length the story of his tussles with actors, theatre directors, critics and reviewers of Butley, an earlier play revived in New York.
In fact Gray’s major struggle is with himself, with his decaying body and the prospect of decline and death. He confesses to huge disappointment at not seeing his name in lights in Times Square - not only is that ‘last triunph’ denied him but there’s no indication of the writer’s name. He is in fact eclipsed by the star of the show, Nathan, whom he compares favourably with Alan Bates who played the lead 30 years before.
The book is divided into 8 Parts, each Part consisting of long or short episodes, mainly of his holidays in Greece, sprinkled with anecdotes on for example his brother Piers, FR Leavis, the dying Harold Pinter, old friends and sundry mistresses from his more potent days.
Throughout the memoir Gray flits like a butterfly from past to present, settling on golden flowers to recall past joys and sorrows, being scathing about minor writers like CP Snow, getting angry with flies and the heat in Spetses, his present hideaway. He retreats on occasion into the persona of an elderly man, ‘a poignant and grotesque spectacle … gulping down black coffee and cigarette smoke to resore his nerves, waiting for his wife Victoria to return from the shops.’ His second wife, to whom the book is dedicated, receives passing mentions throughout, but there is more than a hint of the misogynist in Simon Gray, an honest man who has become a self-hating misanthrope in his decline.
This is for the most part an interesting and amusing memoir dealing with Gray’s final two years. Where it finally hits the buffers is in its concluding sequences where the author retells at length the story of his tussles with actors, theatre directors, critics and reviewers of Butley, an earlier play revived in New York.
In fact Gray’s major struggle is with himself, with his decaying body and the prospect of decline and death. He confesses to huge disappointment at not seeing his name in lights in Times Square - not only is that ‘last triunph’ denied him but there’s no indication of the writer’s name. He is in fact eclipsed by the star of the show, Nathan, whom he compares favourably with Alan Bates who played the lead 30 years before.
The book is divided into 8 Parts, each Part consisting of long or short episodes, mainly of his holidays in Greece, sprinkled with anecdotes on for example his brother Piers, FR Leavis, the dying Harold Pinter, old friends and sundry mistresses from his more potent days.
Throughout the memoir Gray flits like a butterfly from past to present, settling on golden flowers to recall past joys and sorrows, being scathing about minor writers like CP Snow, getting angry with flies and the heat in Spetses, his present hideaway. He retreats on occasion into the persona of an elderly man, ‘a poignant and grotesque spectacle … gulping down black coffee and cigarette smoke to resore his nerves, waiting for his wife Victoria to return from the shops.’ His second wife, to whom the book is dedicated, receives passing mentions throughout, but there is more than a hint of the misogynist in Simon Gray, an honest man who has become a self-hating misanthrope in his decline.
April 7, 2015
This is the third in a trilogy ("The smoking diaries") - I haven't read the others. Not really a diary at all in the traditional sense, and only incidentally about smoking: stream-of-consciousness memoir covering about 2 years, including having a play put on on Broadway, holidays on a Greek island, and episodes in between. Funny, and strangely human despite all sorts of factors which might lead you to expect unlovely ranting of a right-wing nature. I'm sure the author was capable of that but he manages to avoid those pitfalls while still being very much himself, feeling a little bit out of tune with the times perhaps (e.g. the looming smoking ban). Some of his sentences seem to rush on for whole paragraphs without a pause, and indeed they are not sentences in the strict sense as they merge into each other with commas suggesting where to pause for breath. By now the author has in fact died, and lung cancer was one of the several things he had. He comes across as rather older than his actual age would suggest (late 60s: he celebrates his 70th birthday towards the end of the book).
November 25, 2012
A delicious treat to be once again in the self-deprecatingly witty hands of Simon Gray's stream-of-consciousness autobiographical persona. Sad too, as I've now only one more to go - Coda - before the cigarettes finally claim him for the smoking room situated somewhere between heaven and the other place, which is crowded with all the most interesting and lovable people. Reading this just after Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, I realised (a) just what a clever craftsman Simon Gray is, and (b) what a debt modern writers owe to Virginia.
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March 5, 2013The third helping in the discursive "stream of worry" of the ageing playwright, whose pettish, peevish concerns really ought to come across more Daily Mail, and less human, than they do. A good book to read while ill, which is fortunate, because I am.
October 14, 2016
What a fabulous book. I really didn't want to finish it. It's the sort of style that seems so easy and chatty, but hides real craftsmanship. I had to go out and buy all the rest of his diaries when I'd finished this. It is an absolute joy to read such beautiful writing.
November 22, 2011
At times he scales the heights of comedy and at others the depths of sadness. Beautifully balanced and a fitting conclusion to the trilogy ... even if there is one more book to go.
May 6, 2011
amazing amazing.
my review is at asymmetricalmother.blogspot.com
my review is at asymmetricalmother.blogspot.com
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews