SOURCE: "Talking His Way Back to Life: Spalding Gray and the Embodied Voice," in Contemporary Literature, Vol. 37, No. 2, Summer, 1996, pp. 237-58.

In the following essay, Brewer examines Gray's attempt to integrate the mind and body in his autobiographic monologues. According to Brewer, "The reciprocity between life and stage, audience perception and validation of the 'real,' is crucial to Gray's art and its complexity."

Spalding Gray's art is the autobiographic monologue, a composite of reality and artifice. His works, most prominently Swimming to Cambodia and Monster in a Box, share adventures achieved in the pursuit of artistic expression and colored by an obsession with the unattainable—life as art, encapsulated and preserved. The vanity of the unceasing voice—neurotic, amusing, revelatory, self-indicting—conflates with the artist's purpose, the eventual formulation, with practice, of perfect autobiographical "moments." In interviews, Gray realizes the illusoriness of such a goal, "the search...