Published: 05/09/2013
ISBN: 9781847088666
Granta Books
864 pages

The Complete Smoking Diaries

Simon Gray

When he turned sixty-five, playwright Simon Gray began to keep a diary in which he reflected on a life filled with cigarettes (continuing), alcohol (stopped), several triumphs and many more disasters, shame, adultery, friendship and love. Bringing together the four parts of The Smoking Diaries (The Smoking Diaries, The Year of the Jouncer, The Last Cigarette, and Coda) this beautiful 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 brilliant struggle towards some kind of personal truth.

Curmudgeonly, charming, capricious and finely crafted, this makes you think of Samuel Pepys or Alan Clarke. But it is neither. It is Gray

The Times

Works of rare honesty, humanity and wit that are surely destined to be read with pleasure - and scores of footnotes - a hundred years from now

Sunday Telegraph

Relentlessly self-mocking and self-scrutinizing, all while pretending to be just out on a lark; brilliantly orchestrated into a sustained thematic, psychological and philosophical whole... Unbelievably beautiful, unbelievably great, utterly loneliness-assuaging

David Shields, Books of the Year, Salon

The Author

Simon Gray was born in 1936. He began his writing career with Colmain, the first of five novels published by Faber. He is the author of many plays for TV and radio and films, including After Pilkington, which won the Prix Italia, and the Emmy Award-winning Unnatural Pursuits. He wrote more than thirty stage plays, among them Butley and Otherwise Engaged, which both received Evening Standard Awards for Best Play, and The Late Middle Classes, winner of the Barclay’s Best Play Award. His plays Little Nell and Missing Dates were both broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and The Last Cigarette, which he adapted with Hugh Whitemore from The Smoking Diaries, premiered in March 2009. In 1991 he was the BAFTA Writer of the Year. His acclaimed works of non-fiction include An Unnatural Pursuit, How’s That for Telling ‘Em, Fat Lady? and, published by Granta, Fat Chance, Enter a Fox, The Smoking Diaries, The Year of the Jouncer and The Last Cigarette. He was appointed CBE in the 2005 New Year’s Honours for his services to drama and literature. Simon Gray died in August 2008.