How's That for Telling 'Em, Fat Lady?

by Simon Gray

In An Unnatural Pursuit Simon Gray wrote an hilarious account of what it's like to be tortured, paranoid and a playwright. Here, in How's That For Telling 'Em, Fat Lady? , he takes on the United States - from coast to coast. The result is the funniest book ever written about the American theatre, a blackly comic portrait of the author and the grotesque characters he encounters on his travels.

236 pages, Paperback

First published December 31, 1988

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.

Simon James Holliday Gray, CBE (21 October 1936 – 7 August 2008) was an English playwright and memoirist who also had a career as a university lecturer in English literature at Queen Mary, University of London, for 20 years. While teaching at Queen Mary, Gray began his writing career as a novelist in 1963 and, during the next 45 years, in addition to 5 published novels, wrote 40 original stage plays, screenplays, and screen adaptations of his own and others' works for stage, film, and television and became well known for the self-deprecating wit characteristic of several volumes of memoirs or diaries

Reviews

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

A bit too similar to his previous bo0k. Well it would be because he's writing about the same subject - indeed the same play being produced - only this time in America. Probably wasn't the cleverest of ideas to read them back to back but still enjoyable for all that.

[Brian O’Sullivan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating and eminently readable. The curmudgeonly Gray takes us through the process of putting on a play whilst giving us a wry insight into his mind, his daily life and his obsessive drinking and smoking.