Impossible Vacation

by Spalding Gray

Having detailed the agonies of writing a book in his monologue Monster in a Box, Spalding Gray now gives us the monster a convulsively funny, unexpectedly moving novel about a man eternally searching for a moment of protected pleasure even as he is permanently incapable of finding it.Brewster North witnesses his mother's madness but misses her suicide; searches frantically for enlightenment in the Poconos and zipless sex in India; suffers family ennui in Rhode Island and a nervous breakdown in Amsterdam. In the process he emerges as a hilariously complex everyman. And as Gray narrates his hero's free fall, he confirms his own stature as one of our funniest, most eccentric, and most engaging storytellers.From the Trade Paperback edition.

Genres: Fiction, Novels, Travel, Literature, Humor, Contemporary, Literary Fiction

240 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1992

About the author

Spalding Gray was an American actor, screenwriter, performance artist, and playwright.

Reviews

[mark monday · Rating 3 out of 5]

great actor with a sad ending. but honestly this book gave me the creeps. a slow kinda creep, but a creeping creepiness that eventually put me right off the book and the narrator. there's one image in there that stuck with me and I really wish that image would go away. yuck! but I have to admire the honesty on display. ok, one more star for you, why not.

[Charissa · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book the month I left my ex husband and spent 10 days in Maui with my closest girlfriend at the time, Kendra Brock. It was probably my first exposure to such raw self-reflection and intimate self-exposure, my first creative non-fiction or fictional memoir. I've seen people call Spalding Grey narcissistic... and self absorbed... and adolescent... and hedonistic. Maybe I'm so fond of him because I am all those things, I don't know. I know that I admire his ability to so baldly lay all of his neuroses out there for the world to pick at. To so blithely stroll into his dysfunctional life and conjure out of it a narrative that is at once entertaining, instructive, profound, whimsical, evocative, sophisticated. I was so upset to learn of his suicide. To know he suffered from depression and lost his battle with it ultimately... robbing the world of more of his genius. Well... that just leaves me grieving. Spalding had the great gift of looking into a troubled life and viewing it with a light heart at times... of turning misery into gold... a wry turn of phrase. His descriptions of LSD trips in foreign lands, forays into bi-sexual escapades, mistakes of destroying relationships he cares about... it's a brave man who can really unzip his shell to matter-of-factly tell those tales without trying to make himself look better. Spalding is one of the people in this life I would have liked to sat down to dinner with. I did see him perform "Swimming to Cambodia" live in Everett, Washington (of all places). I shook his hand after and told him how much I admired him. If I'd known he was suffering I might have written to him and let him know what he meant to me before he left this world behind for good. Not that it would have changed anything... but I know that some days... that's all it takes for me to decide I'm not so bad after all. Sometimes all it takes is reading a book like this.

[Jim · Rating 4 out of 5]

I miss Spalding Gray and his wasp version of Woody Allen type neurosis.

The book is great, but if you can find the audio version with Spalding reading, it's even better. The urgent, crazy energy of this man's performance is absolutely marvelous.

[Tim · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is called a novel, but it is more like a series of anecdotes, much like the monologues the author excelled at. It tells the story of one Brewster North, from his late teens to his late thirties, and like the rest of Gray's work, it seems mostly autobiographical. There are many emotionally powerful moments here, scenes that provide insight into American culture and its changes over the years, interesting presentations of family life and life among the Boho set. Gray's conversational style is better suited to storytelling than to prose, but the book is well written. There are moments where I would have liked him to provide more depth or background, but boom, his mind is off like a shot into the next adventure or perception.

The book begins with a description of North's middle class Yankee family life as he was growing up in Rhode Island in the 1950s. His mother developed a mental illness when North was a teenager and ultimately committed suicide, and event which haunted him ever since. There is a hilarious, witty description (one of many) of North getting drunk after a girl he has been seeing dumps him because he is unable to have sex with her, then driving to see a production of "The Sea Gull", where he is bitten by the acting bug. North does some acting after college, then moves to New York with his longtime girlfriend Meg in the 1960s. There is an interesting description of a long journey they take to India and Europe in around 1975, including a lovely sojourn to the Himalayas, a visit to Shri Bagwan Rajneesh's ashram, and a long, strange stay in Amsterdam where North has his first gay experience.

Upon returning to the U.S., North and Meg visit his father for the bicentennial Independence Day celebration, and this 10 page segment is one of the best satirical descriptions of American life that I have ever seen. North proceeds to exhibit some type of emotional breakdown in which his behavior becomes strange, his drinking increases, and he is unable to motivate himself. Althou it is not clear what happens, he does begin to pull out of it. The book ends with a solo visit to Santa Cruz and its hippie scene, followed by a week in a Las Vegas jail for beating a check.

This was an enjoyable and lively book - a portrait of a clever, funny correspondent of the personal and the public, and of American life. I was a big fan, and I was saddened to hear of his tragic death, but he left behind a lot of good work for us to enjoy.

[Anushka Malik]

I'm reading another book (You) and the character said this one is great and much underrated and so, of course, I have to put it on my TBR right away, and end up forgetting for the next few months.

[Susan (the other Susan) · Rating 4 out of 5]

If I'd read this for the first time after Gray's suicide, would it have seemed like a giant neon clue? I'm afraid the author's brutal end - brutal to his family, certainly, and himself, and his fans - will forever color his body of work. Gray was all about the impossibility of sustaining happiness, and he seemed to define happiness as the elusive Perfect Moment. I recall an interview in which he explained that he loved to ski fast, and that the speed skier is forced not to THINK "I'm skiing fast" - because in the instant you think it, self-consciousness takes over and you fall... In his novel, the protagonist is forever searching for the Perfect Moment, that thoughtless high, and forever finding disappointment; he's so conscious of trying that he's unable to be in a moment without stepping outside of it to see if it measures up. If you've too often found yourself doing exactly that - evaluating your experience of something wondrous, and thinking, "If only ___ this would be perfect," or even, "This can't last forever," you'll get this book in a way that just might scare the hell out of you.

[Mary! · Rating 1 out of 5]

While I'm a big Spalding Gray fan, this rambling semi-autobiographical piece of complete dreck is one book I'm ashamed to admit I own.

[Joe Johnston · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gray's monologue 'Monster in a Box' is one of my favorite things. It details the extreme difficulty and hilarious obstacles he faced in writing his one-and-only novel. From the monologue I knew the novel concerned a man unable to relax on vacation and because of this I thought it would be the perfect book to read as I accompanied my son to summer scout camp last month. I didn't imagine I'd be able to relax or enjoy myself at scout camp. I was rather dreading the whole thing, actually. So hitching myself to Gray's neuroses (as I've done many times before) seemed like the perfect thing to get me through the week.

Knowing what becomes of Gray, this book must read far more tragically today than when it first came out. I can't help but connect it to Kerouac's Big Sur for those reasons: a narrator who is prescient in the knowledge of what will eventually be his denouement; a narrator fully aware of the signposts but ignoring them, often willfully, for reasons that may or may not translate to all readers.

The novel begins with the narrator, Brewster North (an obvious stand-in for the author), recounting his earliest days, specifically summertime on the beaches of the East coast and the love and approval he felt from his mother as he danced for her in a mask. I spent my earliest days of summer camp helping the scouts find their way to their merit badge classes amidst the miles and miles of trails through the enormous woods of the scout ranch within the Manistee National Forest. After seeing them all off to where they needed to be, I’d spend the remainder of my mornings at the picnic tables of the main ranch pavilion, with a mug of Diet Mountain Dew in my souvenir Gerber Scout Camp cup ($.50 refills at the trading post) and this book at my side. The more and more I read about Brewster North being unable to enjoy a vacation, the more and more I realized I was quite relishing my week away from real life at scout camp.

Much like Brewster North, I don’t ever seem to relax much when on vacation. I don’t know that I ever have, even as a kid. I was a bit of a worried kid, you see. Our vacations were typically driving from Denver back home to Michigan to visit grandparents and cousins. Oh they were great times, and I loved them, but I don’t know how relaxed I ever was. Betwixt the two-day road trip to and fro, my parents and seven brothers and sisters and I would all cram into a single motel room outside Iowa City or Lincoln, Nebraska. When it was my turn to use the shower, the whole time I’d have this niggling feeling in the back of my head that while I was in there, my family would decide to hit the road and forget all about me and I’d have to make my way back home on foot along the median of Interstate 80. I was always the quickest one out of the shower, believe me. And even now, as an adult and husband and father of two, I just don’t ever fully relax on vacation. I always worry about driving, weather, running out of money, whether or not anyone is having any fun. I think I’ve relaxed on a getaway maybe twice in my life, at college alumni camping events years ago when I had no one to look after and steady income and no other metaphorical buttons to push. (Feel free to file this graf under “extensive defense of why I chose to bring this novel with me to scout camp.”)

Brewster comes of age into the theatre and after finally getting a union card and auditioning to play Konstantin in a regional production of Chekhov’s The Seagull (oh man, AGAIN with the similarities to my life), his mother commits suicide. He is out of the country and doesn’t learn of her death until well after she is buried, which generates enough guilt to propel much of the driving action of the remainder of the novel. He moves in with his rug-importer girlfriend in New York, gets work as a life model for an art class and discovers he enjoys the gaze, and they settle into a comfortable life. They arrange for a summer in India for his girlfriend to arrange for the import of rugs from Kashmir amidst other typical vacation activities. There’s an hilarious passage when he visits the cult of the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, which I probably wouldn’t have found very interesting unless I’d recently seen the Netflix documentary on him called Wild Wild Country. They travel to the top of the world in Ladakh (and here Gray brilliantly sets up an outline for the rest of the novel, foreshadowing a fall from the top of the world to the bottom of the Grand Canyon, an outline where I never felt like anything was being spoiled, but merely given a roadmap to his mind vis-à-vis this story) and then individually make their way back to New York via Amsterdam where Brewster has his first homosexual encounter at a bathhouse as part of a desperate attempt to recover from a nervous breakdown.

Brewster and his girlfriend Meg finally arrive back in New York just prior to America’s gaudy bicentennial celebration of July, 1976. They travel to his father-and-new stepmother’s home in Rhode Island to ride out the 4th of July getting drunk and swimming in the backyard pool. They travel back to New York where Brewster seems to get his head on his shoulders with the creation of a one-man-show about his experience with Chekhov’s The Seagull in specific regard to the guilt of missing his mother’s death (this is an obvious stand-in for the genesis of Gray’s particular artistic output, the one-man monologue. And it was exhilarating to read a fictionalization of where that all might have begun.) The show becomes a slow-burning word-of-mouth hit, but Brewster sabotages this artistic success by having an affair with an adventurous young coed from Julliard’s acting program in search of some zen sexual vision quest. Herein lies the dullest portion of the novel.

Look, I’m not a prude. But SO MUCH HAS HAPPENED within the last two years that I can’t not mention the sort of easy-way-out-boring-white-male-novelist-trick of resorting to recounting sexual escapades in lieu of actual character development. I believe Gray is sincere in his use of sex to accelerate his storytelling, far more sincere than, say, Raymond Carver or Philip Roth ever were. BUT, and this is an important but, the tryst with the coed wasn’t necessary to advance the notion of unfulfilled desires, especially after dealing with his bisexuality in such a measured and tender manner just a few chapters prior. What I’m getting at is that the older I get, the fewer and fewer personal favorite novels I’m able to recommend to women. I’d like that trend to reverse. I’m a man, I like novels about men and men stuff like fishing and drinking and woodworking and espionage n’shit. I’d like to be able to recommend the novels I like to both women and men. But I’m not gonna if the narrators spend inordinate amounts of time talking about their wangs. Gray does a little bit.

But he also talks about the serendipitous beauty of letting go, about losing yourself in water. I was so perplexed with the similarities between North/Gray and the authors written about in Olivia Laing’s The Trip to Echo Spring (concerning the alcoholism of some of our finest writers including John Cheever, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tennessee Williams, etc.) Each of the novelists Laing profiles has a connection to large bodies of water and the act of swimming. She wasn’t aware of the correlation until knee-deep in research and the connection to Gray’s life and ultimate demise spooked me the hell out. He begins on the Rhode Island beaches of the Atlantic Ocean, follows it to the frozen waters of late wintertime Amsterdam, observes the audacity of the Ganges, witnesses glaciers melting at the top of the world and knowing they will carry him to the hippie freedom of Santa Cruz and eventually through prison in Las Vegas and the cleansing waters of the Colorado River at the bottom of the world in the Grand Canyon. And amidst all of this are several pages devoted to his saving bugs from his father’s backyard pool on the 4th of July.

I really loved this book. I love Gray’s written prose. It’s a definite extension of his spoken prose, with the permission to delve much deeper into description in ways that wouldn’t work on stage in front of an audience. I found so much familiar in terms of connections to family and desire and need to avoid people and summer and summer people. It’s a great road novel told from the prospective of one who doesn’t necessarily want to live on the edge but appreciates the appeal of renting the occasional one-bedroom adjacent to the edge and reporting back on his findings. On the Road for the too-old-to-rock-and-roll-but-too-young-to-die set. A measured vision quest. I had a similarly measured vision quest at scout camp. It’s quite revealing when you realize that something you’d dreaded ends up being just what you needed to flush-and-fill the brain. And it’s quite humbling to realize that one of your favorite artists wound up being far more fucked up than you at your worst. Makes you want to get out there and try new things and sleep outdoors and do stuff while you can still see and walk.

[Catherine hewitt · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a wild ride this book is –and it's not for the prudish or melancholic. The title is apt as the protagonist, Brewster North, tries to find a way to get away from his depression, mania, and neuroses by searching for the perfect vacation. But, as the saying goes, "Wherever you go, there you are." He can't get away from his problems no matter how far he travels. In fact, Brewster spirals into deeper confusion, panic, and anxiety as he travels to India and Europe where he tries to rid himself of his demons through meditation and Eastern religion as well as sex, drugs, and alcohol. His stable and saintly girlfriend, Meg, tries to help him and hangs in there through his manic depressive episodes across several continents. From watching his films Swimming to Cambodia, Monster in a Box, and Gray's Anatomy, I had Gray's voice in my head reading this book to me (and he had a marvelous speaking voice). Similar to his films, the book has a confessional and autobiographical feel and does not spare any details in its highs and lows. I recommend this book for Gray's splendid writing but do not expect to be cheered up by his experiences. If anything, make sure you've got some comedies cued up on your dvr – you're going to need them.

[Patrick · Rating 4 out of 5]

A little while ago I wrote about Swimming to Cambodia, a copy of which I discovered in a charity shop. I read it and I liked it a lot. And then for a while I forgot about Spalding Gray until one day my wife pointed him out to me in the film Beaches. I think he played a doctor of some kind — I wasn’t really paying attention — but it was enough to get me thinking about his stuff again.

I started trawling YouTube for what I could find. Most of his stuff is out of print, but there at least you can find a few of the monologues — Terrors of Pleasure, Gray’s Anatomy and It’s a Slippery Slope are all delightful. The most interesting primer is Steven Soderbergh’s documentary And Everything is Going Fine, which is assembled entirely from excerpts from Gray’s monologues and interviews. It’s a deft, skilful, and beautifully elegiac piece of work which feels more like one great final performance than it does a conventional biography. Appropriate, perhaps, given that so much of what Gray did was rendering up his life through storytelling.

I also bought a couple of books: Impossible Vacation, which is the only novel Gray published, and the posthumous collection of extracts from his journals. Apparently he laboured for years over the text of Impossible Vacation, with the original draft running to over a thousand pages — the monologue Monster in a Box was actually performed with the manuscript sitting in a scruffy cardboard box at his elbow. The final published form of Impossible Vacation is a relatively svelte few hundred pages in paperback, which is enough to make anyone wonder about the scale of the original.

I was expecting Impossible Vacation to be a bit more novel-like. I was expecting a modern American comic story along the lines of A Confederacy of Dunces, perhaps. But in fact, the novel is a lightly fictionalised version of Gray’s own life. And that’s about as ‘light’ as it gets: it’s funny, but it’s also just as self-involved as any of his monologues. Gray’s protagonist is renamed Brewster North, but not much detective work is required to map North to the author. Much of the novel is mirrored elsewhere in Gray’s stories from the stage: the trip to India, his brief stint as an actor in pornographic movies, the experimental theatre scene in New York; and above all the memory of his mother, and the lasting effects of her suicide.

If you read (and watch) far enough into Gray’s work it feels a little like wandering into a hall of mirrors: we see the same selves and preoccupations reflected over and over again, sometimes in distorted or disturbing ways. Glimpsed in passing the effect is comic, but after a while the effect becomes haunting. There is a moment in Gray’s Anatomy where he describes watching a student in a storytelling workshop, and staring into her eyes, and watching her face somehow disintegrate until the flesh falls from her skull and her face becomes a sort of ball of white light. Sometimes that’s what reading his stories feels like: the contortions of history and storytelling are subject to a relentless focus that becomes so intense that the reader is lulled into a sort of hypnotic compliance.

This feeling of falling into a sort of dissociative trance is not uncommon in his work; it seems emblematic of a sort of transcendental feeling that Gray was perpetually striving for. Hence the dream of the ‘perfect moment’ in Swimming to Cambodia, hence escapism via skiing in It’s a Slippery Slope. Set against that dream of escape is everything the real world has to offer: the anguish of the domestic; the problems caused by anxiety, depression, drinking; the sad, strange, tortuous complications of his love life. In these respects, it hasn’t aged well – I can imagine audiences today having a little less patience for Gray’s occasional sways into mysticism. And his attitude towards women might at times be generously described as ‘problematic’. In the 90s perhaps it was easier to dismiss his casual reports of philandering as the trappings of the tortured artist; today it only seems sad, and a little wearying.

So why is it that I find his stuff so appealing? I’m not in the habit of reading biography. I like podcasts, but while Gray seems like a model for all kinds of modern tendencies in vlogging, I’m not aware of anyone who is doing exactly what he did in the same way he did it. Current trends towards the confessional in stand-up comedy don’t quite fit, either. The form of the thing is so important. He was as much a performer as he was a storyteller. The closest equivalent that I know of is David Sedaris, and I find his stuff intolerable. There are a few reasons for this, but to me Sedaris always seems convinced that the problem is with other people. He is stuck in a mode of perpetual disdain. But with Gray, we are never really left in any doubt that this author is in fact the only author of his own troubles. And yet he also knows how to have fun, sometimes; and I find that endearing because it seems to me more honest, and less spiteful.

One point of comparison is Proust. I don’t mean to say Gray’s prose is exactly Proustian, but they have an endearing amount in common. There’s a perpetual anxiety about death and entropy that often manifests itself as hypochondria. There’s the obsession with the mother, the retiring nature, the preoccupation with irony. The pursuit of the perfect moment through which emotion can become recollected in tranquility. And though both took to entirely different forms of media, it seems like both were attempting something a level of formal innovation which, while initially seeming familiar, approached a new way of committing memory and experience into art.

Impossible Vacation is often intense but it’s not always laugh-out-loud funny. More often it seems possessed by a restless, struggling, enquiring energy. Sometimes the writing is inspired, but it lacks form – the feeling of form that was so dominant in the monologues themselves. As it stands, you wouldn’t consider half of the things that go on in the book as the plot for a novel because (like life) they don’t entirely cohere. And the story ends before it ever really begins, though it does at least contrive a neat circular ending that recalls (lightly) Finnegans Wake.

Still, it’s a shame that the novel is out of print because, much like his monologues, it’s certainly worthwhile; the published journals of Spalding Gray are an entirely different and more difficult thing. The journals are kind of a mess. An enormous amount of biographical heavy lifting is provided by the notes and annotations by the editor, Nell Casey, and without this context any reader would struggle to discern what was going on. But the notes are pretty comprehensive, and in the end this seems as close to a biography as we are ever likely to get. It does, however, take a long time to get going. The journal entries all through the 70s and early 80s are sketchy, and not especially interesting. A lot of the time they’re purely expressive, and we have to be told what it is exactly that they are referring to. It’s only once the monologues get going that his private style becomes elaborate and involved enough to be worth reading.

The picture we get of Gray is less of a single-minded auteur and more of a man who sort of wandered-or-fell into fame as a monologuist. After the fame and exposure of Swimming to Cambodia there is a sense of freewheeling — of doing what he’s doing because it’s what he does, and it’s rarely entirely under his own steam. He is perpetually worried, questioning, uncomfortable. Eventually he would become concerned with the idea that he had used himself up, and that he had no private life worth living outside the performances. But some of this was ameliorated by the late in life arrival of children and a more settled family situation. For a while, he thought himself happier than he had ever been.

In 2001, Gray was involved in a terrible car crash while on holiday in Ireland. His injuries included a broken hip and a fractured skull that likely caused brain damage. The accident changed his life, and afterwards he was never the same. The journal entries from after this point are harrowing — there is no other word for it. I knew of his eventual suicide, but I had no idea until of the extent to which depression utterly consumed his life. I didn’t know about the frequent hospitalisations, the shock treatment, and the pain his failed suicide attempts caused on others. There aren’t many extracts from this time shown, but what we are given was enough at times to make me wonder if any of it should have been published at all. But perhaps there is a purpose in trying to give a picture of the anguish he was in.

All through his life Gray had been preoccupied with the idea of his mother taking her own life. The story he told about this was that this was precipitated by his parents moving house, to a new place away from the ocean, which his mother could never feel at home in. After the accident he and his family also moved house, and he came to regret this decision intensely. The editor Nell Casey calls this ‘his obsession, a mythic rant’. Gray cannot seem to accept the idea that a house might be, as a psychologist puts it, ‘a pile of sticks’. Here is how Gray considers trying to explain it to his sons:

‘…And they said, I’m sure, that, you know, Mrs. Gray—my mom—has other problems about the house, it must be symbolic of something, that same old Freudian rap, you know, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, sometimes a house is just a house. She missed the house. It wasn’t symbolic of something, she really missed walking along the sea. I miss walking in the village, I miss the cemetery, I miss hundreds of things. But boys, listen: when you get to that point, where you have been driven so crazy by something, like for me, when I think about the house, it’s not me thinking about it, it’s thinking me…’

[Sam Crisp]

It was funny reading this right after Limmy's Surprisingly Down to Earth, and Very Funny because the books have a lot in common: both are autobiographies of a male experimental comic performance artist who struggles with mental health, has a long-suffering partner who provides crucial feedback on his work as well as doing all his laundry, and a good chunk of the book exhaustively chronicles all the sex he's had in his life. Also, both books feature many anecdotes that have been told repeatedly in live performances, whether in a theatre or on a Twitch stream, but invariably ones I've encountered in recordings uploaded to YouTube. The novelty is in reexperiencing them adapted into the framework of a novel.

Well, I'm a fan of both Limmy and Spalding Gray. Lloyd Cole didn't like Limmy's autobiography but admits that it was probably because he was not already familiar with his comedy work. If Lloyd is also unfamiliar with Spalding Gray, I would hesitate to recommend Impossible Vacation to him for the same reason but – if you are ready to be heartbroken – I would recommend the movie And Everything Is Going Fine as an entry point into Spalding Gray's work. You can stream it on the Criterion Channel. Or just type his name into YouTube.

[dale · Rating 2 out of 5]

Atrociously self-indulgent. I've read and watched the majority of Spalding Gray's monologues, and I'm actually a sizeable fan of him, but this odious and depressing smut was just pretentious drivel.

It bolsters the real-life anecdotes behind the narrative to better present Brewster North (Gray's fantasy stand-in), but it just comes off as desperate and aimless. I'm glad he only wrote the one novel, as I can return to burning through the remainder of his oft-brilliant monologues.

You cannot win them all, I guess.

[Anders · Rating 4 out of 5]

Spalding Gray is the only person I've ever heard of whose art form was the monologue, who can be described as a "monologuist." This is his first and only novel, an autobiographical work executed lucidly and vividly. His knack for storytelling is in full force here, and is a tremendous read. It covers his childhood, mainly his experiences with his mother who suffered from bi-polar disorder and took her own life in 1967, and his subsequent misadventures traveling around the world. While searching for a "real vacation," Gray came to realize that he also suffered from bi-polar disorder, a story made impossibly more sad by the fact of his own eventual suicide in 2004. This book is terrific: evocative, startlingly personal and honest, and completely riveting.

[Kye Alfred Hillig · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's crazy to think that this novel was originally 1,900 pages Considering that the finished version was just a little over two hundred. My god, how Spalding goes on a journey. It is like a nonstop slideshow of human suffering, sex, art and spiritual searching. There are so many memorable parts in this book. He and the girl he is cheating on his girlfriend with go and buy strange masks so they can videotape themselves having sex. His nervous breakdown when he is only awake for four hours of the day. His mothers suicide. Trips to India. Weeks in jail making toast with inmates. I never got bored. He really milked this fucker for all he had.

[Jenny Mckeel · Rating 4 out of 5]

I adored this book mostly because I adore Spalding Gray and his version of eccentricity and mental anguish. Also it's hilariously funny. It's mostly a chronicle of how over a period of time he loses his shit -- it's about his emotional state and I think he does a great job of weaving his internal experience into external events and descriptions. It's told in a very comforting, intimate, storyteller-like voice and I had trouble putting it down. His version of reality is unique and refreshing to me, even though for most of this book his character is an asshole. It's wonderful.

[Earle · Rating 3 out of 5]

A compelling read; reminds me of Kerouac's On The Road but with more drugs, booze and profligate sex. It's particularly enlightening since I've had such a sheltered life, not experiencing any of those things...... okay, but two out of three isn't bad. The main character here is rather pathetic, you want things to turn out with a happy ending, but if this book is autobiographical, then it doesn't.

[Andrew Hecht · Rating 4 out of 5]

Before you read this book, you have to see Spaulding Gray's monologue, Monster in a Box, which essentially the describes the excruciating process the hypernuerotic Gray went through to write this book.

I've been a huge Spauling Gray fan since I discovered Swimming to Cambodia, both the movie and the book. And I consider myself really lucky to have seen him in one of his last performances in New York before he tragically took his own life.

[Lauren · Rating 4 out of 5]

spaulding gray(may he rest in peace as he committed suicide last year) was one of the most eccentric and engaging strytellers. i saw him performing live in his one man show 'monster in a box' about 15 years ago. this book was written about an alledgedly fictitious character called brewster north. is brewster really spaulding? i think so. i loved this book as it opens spaulding gray's quirkiness to the public.

[Tim · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love this book! I've re-read it like 20 times. Hilarious. I think everyone ought to read it. We have it easy in America, but it is also very empty and confusing too. "The Founding Fathers ruined everything for us when they included the pursuit of happiness in the declaration. Now we are doomed to run forever like race dogs chasing a mechanical rabbit." (my paraphrase). I think he was right.

[Lauren]

Each of us suffers some kind of malady. But maladies can be okay when they're cherished and strained through the sieve of wandering, impulse and fantasy. It's how Spalding Gray lived, and his is the beatific, fictionalized story told here.

I love you, Mr. Gray. You understood madness. I am sorry that you had to leave us early, but thank you for giving us what you did.

[Chris Sloyer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Found a signed copy of this in the used book section at Barnes and Noble. Definitely a funny, crazy book and definitely not for "prudes":)

[Zeb Allan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Impossible Vacation is a semi-autobiographical novel that intertwines humor, tragedy, existential musings and a graphic struggle between the polarity of Mania and depression. Published in 1992, the book follows the life of Brewster North, a character whose experiences mirror Gray’s own struggles with mental health and the search for meaning.

The novel begins with Brewster’s almost idyllic childhood, marked by his mother’s mental illness and eventual suicide. As an adult, Brewster embarks on a journey to find enlightenment and hedonistic pleasure, traveling to places like the Poconos, India, Amsterdam and with the United States of America. Brewster has a burning obsessive desire to see Bali. Despite his struggle to lift himself from the mire; Brewster is haunted by his mother’s death and his own emotional turmoil, leading to a series of personal and existential crises.

Brewster’s reaction to his mother’s suicide is a central theme, influencing his actions and emotional state throughout the novel. Genetic mental illness follows Brewster’s travels and experiences reflect his quest for enlightenment and fulfillment. The novel provides a candid depiction of mental illness and its impact on individuals and families. Gray balances comedic elements with the darker aspects of Brewster’s life, creating a narrative that is both entertaining, thought-provoking and a clear signal to those that also suffer from mental illnesses that Grey is writing from personal experience.

Gray’s narrative voice is unique and conversational, drawing readers into Brewster’s world with a blend of dark humor and raw honesty. His use of imagery and symbolism adds depth to the story, making it a rich and immersive read. From the first page Greys mastery of the written language is displayed in wonderful prose such as "The air was fresh then. The air was so fresh that it burned like a pure white fire in our lungs."

A bold and introspective novel that showcases Spalding Gray’s talent as a storyteller. It’s a must-read for those interested in psychological and existential themes, as well as fans of Gray’s unique narrative style.

[amy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating character. The themes were a wee bit vulgar at times and, about 3/4 in, the dude went completely off an unrelatable neurotic deep end, but I have a soft spot in my heart for travel memoirs that remind me why I love and hate to travel.

His description of India, with its oppressive heat and over-crowded two-wheeled vehicles, reminded me of my experiences in Thailand and Costa Rica (but probably much more intense, which is why I have never attempted to visit India); this section contained the funniest, saddest sentence I have ever read: "...people in the sweaty hundreds squatted by the edge of the road doing everything Western people usually do in the deepest privacy of their bathrooms." I literally alternated between laughter and sobs several minutes until my throat hurt.

While his visit to the the Himalayas was in India, it took me back to Bhutan, and the way I desperately wanted to be a part of their open, friendly culture, but knew how very much an outsider I would always be.

Then, to top it off, he spends a considerable amount of time in Santa Cruz (of all places). I tried to picture all of the places he was talking about as they were 20 years before my arrival. I'm guessing he was staying somewhere near downtown and, perhaps, the beach 15 minutes North of town was Scott Creek Beach? The only place he names specifically is "Purgalasi" (the beloved Caffe Pergolesi) that I visited now and again while in college, where I had my first spiced tea ("Chai it, you'll like it," the menu said) but I could usually only afford to have a hard-boiled egg, and later frequented with my knitting Meetup. I otherwise had little use for a coffee shop, much less one with only one toilet available to customers. He introduces this section with: "As soon as I rolled into Santa Cruz, I knew it was the right town for me." I couldn't agree more.

[Tom · Rating 3 out of 5]

Swimming to Cambodia is one of my favourite films; I really enjoyed the film of Monster in a Box; I saw It's a Slippery Slope performed live at Laurie Anderson's Meltdown and it was one of the most moving pieces of theatre I've ever seen.

This book, however.... I don't know. I really don't. Individual moments are fantastic, but as an autobiographical novel, it seems to be neither fish nor flesh. I kept thinking: why am I reading this? What is it telling me?

I kept thinking: if Spalding Gray had written this as a monologue, it would probably have been brilliant.

But as a novel? None of the characters, even the narrator, come off the page. As a picture of a narcissistic sex-addict/manic depressive, maybe it's accurate, but if it were someone less skilful than Gray writing it, I wouldn't have bothered. There's a feeling of: this was really important for me. But I couldn't quite get how.

Sorry, Spalding. Wherever you are (and I hope you're not dead) lots of love, but not for this.

[Leah Myree · Rating 5 out of 5]

Since finishing this book it’s stuck with me like gum on my jeans. The intense, neurotic stream of consciousness is all too close to my own daily struggle. The entire book is Brewster stuck deeply in his head while he spirals. Nothing REALLY happens, it’s not a concise plot that ties everything up in the end. It’s a spinning recollection of mental illness and life lived on the brink.

Some of the imagery is disturbing, especially Brewsters incessant and self-destructive pursuit of tantric sex. However the monotone, unabashed way of talking about those things is what gives this novel it’s charm. It’s not so much someone telling you a story as it is living in our hero’s head for awhile.

Overall I enjoyed other books more, but this one made me grow as a human and that counts for a lot.

[ethan · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5/5

Needlessly inappropriate to an extent that would even make the worst excesses of Philip Roth pale in comparison. A bit amateurish—much more telling than showing—and a protagonist as liable to cause a scoff and an eye-roll as a true moment of “wow, i see myself in Brewster”. Nonetheless, some stunning moments of pathos, a competent (if overstated and obvious) oedipal narrative, and a protagonist who (for all his faults) is utterly believable. Were Brewster North real he would’ve been one of a hundred thousand carbon copies in New York alone.

A truly mid book, which is upsetting considering that Swimming to Cambodia, Gray’s 1987 monologue, is one of the most evocative and gripping pieces of nonfiction I’ve ever had the pleasure of engaging with.

[Courtney · Rating 5 out of 5]

What can I say when a book leaves you speechless? This is pure genius work on these pages. It’s captivating and tugs at your heartstrings And makes you reflect on what you’re doing in life! I am head over heals in love with Impossible Vacation and would recommend it to anyone who is struggling or questioning the meaning of life. Spalding Gray you were an amazing writer and this book is a gift to everyone! Thank you thank you thank you!

[Ben Ackley · Rating 5 out of 5]

I can't pretend to be an unbiased reviewer. I read "Impossible Vacation" over the course of my worst summer — internship I hated, living alone in a cabin in the woods. June-August was just one long, depressive episode, and I was forced to confront my demons. Impossible Vacation was the only book I finished while living in the cabin, and I empathized with the anxiety, depression, loneliness throughout. This isn't a perfect book by any means, but at the right time, it can be. It was for me.

[Anne Marie Carey · Rating 3 out of 5]

Was feeling guilty while reading - both having the feeling that I really didn't like the main character, but the guilt of feeling insensitive to his mental health struggles. Then after reading up about the author after finishing the book, a numbing sadness crept in and sits pretty heavy. At least I feel accomplished for finally reading this after it's been on my shelf for many many years. Now it can go back onto a 'freebie' shelf like where I first grabbed it.

[Matthew Collins · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very strange book that lacks a forward momentum. Many of the anecdotes are funny, some uncomfortable, but there's no real hook or plot aside from the continuing descent of Brewster North's mental state.
I'd recommend Spalding's monologues such as 'Swimming to Cambodia' or 'Monster in a Box' (the latter of which is about the writing of this novel), but leave this to the completionists only.