The Smoking Diaries
By Simon Gray
2001
First Published
3.68
Average Rating
240
Number of Pages
Part of Series
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."
Avg Rating
3.68
Number of Ratings
248
5 STARS
23%
4 STARS
37%
3 STARS
28%
2 STARS
10%
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
