"Looking backward, [Gray] spoke for a generation; looking forward, he helped inspire (for better and worse) a generation of memoirists, most of whom lacked his self-deprecating humor ... Gray comes across as a genuinely noble, striving, seeking soul, felled by a malignant fate. ... Gray's work deserves to last."

-- Ron Rosenbaum, The New York Times Book Review (October 30, 2011)

"The Journals of Spalding Gray is necessary reading for all admirers of Gray's art: the series of autobiographical monologues in which he more or less created a new, emotionally bare theatrical form. ... Ms. Casey does an excellent job of providing context, describing the arc of Gray's life as he moved from struggling young actor to established artist, and from chronically dissatisfied narcissist ... to deeply loving and happy father. On almost every page there is a bitingly funny insight.'"

-- Charles Isherwood, The New York Times (November 16, 2011)

"Why, seven years after his death, do his monologues retain their power--a power that, were Gray not such a dogged atheist, could best be described as spiritual? He recorded his fears more explicitly in the Journals, the first entry of which, written at the age of twenty-five, is a reflection on suicide. ... The journals in [the years after his car accident] record a harrowing descent into madness, when he turned one of his greatest talents as a storyteller--his ability to find connections between disparate observations and events--against himself."

-- Nathaniel Rich, The New York Review of Books (December 8, 2011)

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