The Smoking Diaries Volume 3: The Last Cigarette - Softcover

Gray, Simon

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1847080723 ISBN 13: 9781847080721

Publisher: Granta Books, 2008

Synopsis

The final volume of the trilogy that began with The Smoking Diaries finds Simon Gray determined to give up smoking. Really. At last. Can he kick the habit of sixty years? Will he, sometime soon, be able to leave his house without nervously feeling for his two packets of twenty and his two lighters? As this wonderful, wayward record of Gray's life progresses, these questions are overtaken by much larger ones. What was sex like before 1963? Will his name be in lights on Broadway? Why leave the bedside of his dying mother? With their combination of comedy and serious reflection, of sharp observation and painful self-disclosure, Simon Gray's diaries reinvented the memoir form and are destined to become classics of autobiography.

About this title

About the Author

Simon Gray was born in 1936. He began his writing career with Colmain, the first of five novels published by Faber. He is the author of many plays for TV and radio and films, including After Pilkington, which won the Prix Italia, and the Emmy Award-winning Unnatural Pursuits. He wrote more than thirty stage plays, among them Butley and Otherwise Engaged, which both received Evening Standard Awards for Best Play, and The Late Middle Classes, winner of the Barclay's Best Play Award. His plays Little Nell and Missing Dates were both broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and The Last Cigarette, which he adapted with Hugh Whitemore from The Smoking Diaries, premiered in March 2009. In 1991 he was the BAFTA Writer of the Year. His acclaimed works of non-fiction include An Unnatural Pursuit, How's That for Telling 'Em, Fat Lady? and, published by Granta, Fat Chance, Enter a Fox, The Smoking Diaries, The Year of the Jouncer and The Last Cigarette. He was appointed CBE in the 2005 New Year's Honours for his services to drama and literature. Simon Gray died in August 2008.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Smoking Diaries Volume 3

The Last CigaretteBy Simon Gray

Granta Books

Copyright © 2013 Simon Gray
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9781847080721

I’m still in Suffolk, where it’s a typical August afternoon, cold anddamp, with England losing a test match in Birmingham, and thingscan’t go on like this. I say that, but how can they change? Well, I canmake them change by stating categorically –That intend to give up smoking.I’ve left out the ‘I’. Do it again, with the ‘I’ in it. I intend to give up smoking.There. I’ve put it down. It’s legible, in firm, blue ballpoint. There’sno getting away from it because it’s plonk in the middle of the page,and to tear it out would be cheating.This diary is going to be about my attempt to give up smoking.It is also going to be my main help in giving up smoking. By thetime I’ve finished it I will be a free man, able to leave the housewithout my two packets of cigarettes, and my two lighters, able tosit down and read without compulsively checking that I’ve gotthese four articles in place on the desk in front of me or on thelittle table beside me. I shall never again have to grope for acigarette while watching television, fly into a panic when I can’tput my hand straight on the package – is that an unintendeddouble entendre, ‘put my hand straight on the package’? I have anidea that ‘package’ has a salacious meaning, or am I thinking of‘parcel’?Nor worry that I might fall asleep with a cigarette burning on thebrink of the ashtray, or while hanging from my lips.There will be no cigarette burns – at least of my making – on mytrousers and my shirt fronts.The cuffs of my cardigans will no longer be singed. No, that’s notright. I am devoted to my two cardigans, which are identical inevery respect, including the location and the extent of the singes, soto put it accurately, there will be no further singes on my twocardigans. In the unlikely event that I ever have a new cardigan, andthat I wear it, it will never be singed at the cuffs. At least not by me.

Continues...

Excerpted from The Smoking Diaries Volume 3 by Simon Gray Copyright © 2013 by Simon Gray. Excerpted by permission.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Granta Books
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1847080723
• ISBN 13: 9781847080721
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 312