Published: 23/01/2013
ISBN: 9781847088543
Granta Books
312 pages

The Smoking Diaries Volume 3

Simon Gray

The final volume of the trilogy that began with The Smoking Diaries finds Simon Gray determined to give up smoking. Really. At last. Can he kick the habit of sixty years? Will he, sometime soon, be able to leave his house without nervously feeling for his two packets of twenty and his two lighters? As this wonderful, wayward record of Gray’s life progresses, these questions are overtaken by much larger ones. What was sex like before 1963? Will his name be in lights on Broadway? Why leave the bedside of his dying mother?

With their combination of comedy and serious reflection, of sharp observation and painful self-disclosure, Simon Gray’s diaries reinvented the memoir form and are destined to become classics of autobiography.

A great achievement, a terrific read, every page crammed with jokes, philosophical observations

Lloyd Evans, Spectator

His apparently spontaneous, but I suspect meticulously crafted journals are highly addictive, often wildly funny but also, and this is increasingly the case, deeply moving ... they are works of rare honesty, humanity and wit that are surely destined to be read with pleasure a hundred years from now

Sunday Telegraph

There are few things more enjoyable than reading the diaries of Simon Gray ... very, very funny

Irish Mail on Sunday

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.