The Smoking Diaries: The Year of the Jouncer

The Smoking Diaries #2

by Simon Gray

As a baby, Simon Gray discovered that he could move his carriage while still nestling inside it. "It was a complete mystery to the adult intelligences, how had he done it, if it was he who had done it, but if not he, who then and why? So the next afternoon they planted the pram in the usual spot, and stood over it, watching—the baby lay there smiling or snivelling up at them, until it struck them that they should try observing the baby when unobserved by the baby, and they withdrew behind bushes and trees; and thus witnessed the swaying of the pram, then the juddering of the pram, then its slow, unsteady progress along the path, the movement accompanied by a low humming and keening sound from within that reminded them more of a dog than a human . . . jouncing was the word they used for it. I was a jouncer therefore." In these hilarious chronicles of triumph and disaster, Gray intertwines scenes from his adult and his child self to produce a brilliant and moving counterpoint of life’s unsteady progress.

Genres: Nonfiction, Memoir, Biography

282 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2005

About the author

Librarian 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

Reviews

[Katie Lynn]

Incomprehensible and devoid of reward for trudging through it.

[Disarticulate]

Year of the Jouncer is playwright Simon Gray's second volume of diaries following his critically acclaimed The Smoking Diaries. In The Smoking Diaries, the diary format, allowed Gray to meditate on his life as a whole and had the depth and scope of a biography.

The Year of the Jouncer was written just a year later and so lacks the previous volume's autobiographical charms. In a sense Gray is running out of material having covered much of his life in the previous volume and so The Year of a Jouncer depends on a more conventional day-to-day format. As with most published diaries, the success depends on how interesting the subject's life actually is. This becomes a major issue in the first section with Gray and his wife on holiday. I don't know about you but I didn't find the day to day account of a 68 year old' holiday in Barbados rivetting stuff even if there are cameos by Harold Pinter and Antonia Fraser.

Luckily The Year of the Jouncer coincides with the publication of The Smoking Diaries (how meta) and of the filming of a BBC documentary about the work while two of Gray's plays are staged - Holy Terror featuring Simon Callow and The Old Masters directed by Harold Pinter. Some of the funniest sections in the diary deal with Gray's mortification of watching his plays and reminiscing on previous productions he was involved in. As with Gray, it is the tangents that provide the most satisfying material and the endless parentheses on every page attest to this discursive style.

Like his previous volume, The Year of the Jouncer is written in his inimitable style at once curmudgeonly, caustic, self-deprecating, poignant, melancholic and ultimately hilarious. How Gray can imbue such prosaic incidents with such tremendous humour is an amazing feat. His description of being relentlessly bullied by a greedy Tom cat that demands feeding was a standout passage for me.

As a companion piece to The Smoking Diaries, The Year of the Jouncer is a must read and the pleasure of spending time in the company of such a mind as Gray's bears repeating. I have the complete volume of his published diaries and I know I soon will be moving onto The Last Cigarette, the penultimate volume.

[Janelle V. Dvorak]

It's hard for me to believe that about a year ago I had no idea who Simon Gray was, although as a fan of the late Alan Bates I had a vague idea that Gray was somehow linked to Butley. In any case, I enjoyed Year of the Jouncer even more than The Smoking Diaries. His passages about Alan Bates as an actor and as a man, describing his life, his last days and his death are incredibly poignant. Equally poignant are the periodic mentions of his brother Piers and the long ago sin of omission in Gray's life of which he is still ashamed.

Sometimes Gray is a bit discursive, but stick with it and you will be rewarded.

[Lavinia]

I could say I am Simon Gray's biggest fan, but everybody who loves him says that. I haven't enjoyed reading a work of non-fiction so much since.. last time I read one of his books. Funny of course, but very moving in parts, as when telling of the death of the boy he was in love with at school, when he was ill in hospital Gray couldn't summon up the courage to visit him.

[Granny Swithins]

I seem to be reading his life in reverse, starting with Coda and working backwards. Very enjoyable read, poignant to be reading this at the same time as Antonia Fraser's memoir on Harold Pinter (audio version of Must You Go?) as events overlap.

[John]

More of the same but from this writer it's what you want.