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. "So here I am, two hours into my sixty-sixth year.... The truth is that I'm nastier than I used to be back when—back when I was sixty-four, for instance, when I was nastier than when I was at sixty-two and so forth, back and back, always the less nasty the further back, until I get to the age when I was pre-nasty, at least consciously, when the only shame I knew was the shame of being found out, which was when I was, well, about eight, I suppose."

In these, the latest chronicles of triumph and disaster from the celebrated author of "The Smoking Diaries", Gray intertwines scenes from his adult and his childish self to produce a brilliant and moving counterpoint of life's unsteady progress.

Book by Gray, Simon

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.

Notable for his uncompromising honesty and a wit both fierce and fearless, Simon Gray's voice was uniquely his own - intelligent, probing and often outrageously funny. He faced life - and death - with unflinching courage and defiant humanity; even when writing about his own mortality, he lost none of his prodigious talent to entertain. Warm, candid and with a double dose of dark humour, this dramatisation of Gray's The Smoking Diaries and other memoirs was completed just before his death last summer. The Last Cigarette premiered at the Minerva Theatre, Chichester in March 2009.