Coda
By Simon Gray
2008
First Published
3.94
Average Rating
272
Number of Pages
Part of Series
From heartbreaking reflections on his own mortality to characteristically outrageous asides—"everybody knows somebody who knows somebody who was given six months to live, and here they are, only just dead, eight years later or, in exceptional cases, here they still are, eating oysters and boring the shit out of people"—Gray's self-proclaimed "last written words on the subject of myself" records his extraordinary emotional journey. Darkly comic depictions of the medical team are set against joyful accounts of sunlit days with this beloved wife, Victoria, in Crete and a beautiful early summer in Suffolk. Woven into the narrative are arguments with himself, "Dialogue between a Thicko and a Sicko," a shameful childhood memory, and a masterfully tense "distraction," written in real time while waiting for his final prognosis—and smoking one last cigarette. Written with exceptional candor and a poignant reluctance to leave this world behind, Coda is painful and beautiful.
Avg Rating
3.94
Number of Ratings
84
5 STARS
32%
4 STARS
40%
3 STARS
19%
2 STARS
6%
1 STARS
2%
goodreads
Author
Simon Gray
Author · 11 books
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
