Product Description
When he twisted sixty-five, the playwright Simon Gray started to protect a diary: not a careful honing of the day’s actions with a view to posterity but an account of his thoughts as he had them, honestly, emotionally, digressively expressed. The three volumes of “The Smoking Diaries” are the result, in which lone of Britain’s most amusing and original writers reflects on a life to the top with cigarettes (continuing), alcohol (stopped), several triumphs and loads of more disasters, shame, adultery, friendship and like. Few diarists have been as frank about themselves, and even fewer as entertaining.This gorgeous boxed set contains paperbacks of “The Smoking Diaries”, “The Smoking Diaries: The Year of the Jouncer”, and “The Smoking Diaries: The Last Cigarette”, only just in print in hardback in April 2008.With their amalgamation of comedy and serious reflection, of astute observation and painful self-disclosure, Simon Gray’s diaries have reinvented the memoir form and are destined to be converted into classics of autobiography. The beauty of them lies in Gray’s struggle to place a finger on some kind of private truth. “The Smoking Diaries” produce a brilliant and moving account of life’s unsteady progress – with unfailing wit and humour, they take us to the very sensitivity of a man.
