Spalding Gray first rose to prominence in the mid-1980s through his autobiographical monologue Swimming to Cambodia. Jonathan Demme's film exposed Gray's stripped-down theatrical persona--sitting behind a desk, talking about the most intimate details of his life--to a substantially larger audience. He would create several more monologues in the years following that success, while struggling with hereditary clinical depression (often using aspects of that struggle in his monologues). In early 2004, he was working on a new story about his efforts to recover from a debilitating car crash when he vanished; his body was found two months later, an apparent suicide.

Journalist Nell Casey was originally contacted by Gray's widow, Kathleen Russo, with the idea of writing a biography, but then Casey discovered that Gray had been keeping journals from the age of 25 until his death nearly four decades later. "I'd thought Gray had already told the story of his life through his monologues," Casey admits. "But as I read, it quickly became clear that the monologues offered only a hint of what was truly going on in his life." Casey persuaded Russo that the journals deserved to be published. "I felt that I was reading the mind of a truly original person," she says. "Someone who repeatedly, and at great risk to his emotional life, dove into himself in order to come back up with larger 'truths' that he might deliver in his work."

At just over 300 pages, The Journals of Spalding Gray represents only a fraction of the more than 5,000 pages of material available to Casey. But that's enough to give readers an unforgettable portrait of a Character Approved artist who transformed our idea of what a dramatic monologue could be. In 1970, Gray wrote two questions in a notebook: "How much truth can a person take? How honest will I be able to be?" The Journals allow us, for the first time, to see just how deeply he grappled with those questions throughout his career.

[Image: Estate of Spalding Gray]