The Smoking Diaries

“Curmudgeonly, charming, capricious, and finely crafted” (The Times [UK]), these diaries by a lauded English playwright recount friendships, affairs, the onset of illness, and the pleasures and pains of a life devoted to theater. When he turned sixty-five, the acclaimed playwright Simon Gray began to keep this diary: not a careful honing of the day’s events with a view to posterity but an account of his thoughts as he had them, honestly, turbulently, digressively expressed. The Smoking Diaries is the result, in which one of Britain's most amusing and original writers reflects on a life filled with cigarettes (continuing), alcohol (stopped), several triumphs, and many more disasters, shame, adultery, friendship, and love. Few diarists have been as frank about themselves, and even fewer as entertaining. Bringing together the four parts of The Smoking Diaries, this volume is filled with comedy and serious reflection, sharp observation and painful self-disclosure. A brilliant and moving account of life’s unsteady progress, it takes the reader to the heart of one man’s struggle towards some kind of personal truth.