Title: The Journals of Spalding Gray
Editor: Nell Casey
Year: 2011/2012
Publisher: Vintage
Pages: 384
The first of two books unwittingly read simultaneously in which the major setting is New York and a boy is named Theo.
Well-edited and riveting, these journal entries highlight the obsessions and unhappiness that we knew to underlie Gray's performances, but didn't usually get to see in such raw and unpolished form. As I read, I thought that this would be a good journal/memoir for teaching future therapists how to form initial psychological diagnostic impressions. Following Gray's auto accident, it became a very clear example of the differences between a "normal" troubled psychological state and a devastating head injury-induced state in which obsessional anxieties and dread become endless, locking loops that can't be interrupted. Gray's suicide seemed a great tragedy to me; after reading, I have more empathy and understanding for his unsustainable state of post-TBI misery and horror.
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