SOURCE: "The Art of Autobiography: An Interview with Spalding Gray," in Cineaste, Vol. 19, No. 4, Fall, 1992, pp. 34-7.

In the following interview, Gray discusses the production of his stage and film performances, the evolution of his monologues, and his literary influences.

In many respects, the success of the film adaptations of two of Spalding Gray's more crowd-pleasing monologues, Jonathan Demme's Swimming to Cambodia (1987) and Nick Broomfield's Monster in a Box (1992), represents the ongoing 'mainstreaming' of portions of the downtown New York avant-garde, a trend which could also be observed in the solo film debuts of performers such as Laurie Anderson and Eric Bogosian. Yet, unlike Anderson or Bogosian, autobiography is Gray's chosen genre, and this choice has been both the source of Gray's appeal and the source of confusion. Autobiography can be naively understood as pure self-revelation, or more cannily recognized as cleverly wrought subterfuge. Gray's unabashedly autobiographical monologues...