Spalding Interrupted

n "Swimming to Cambodia," Spalding Gray quotes his mother, who committed suicide when she was 52 and who always said, "Think of the starving Koreans." When his obsessions begin to overtake him in that monologue, he reflects on "the therapeutic joys of living in New York City. It always works. As soon as you think you're crazy, all you have to do is look over your shoulder." But at a certain point for Mr. Gray, it was no longer possible for him to look over his shoulder for someone worse off than he was. Starving Koreans no longer did the trick. They never do if you're as depressed as Mr. Gray was for much of his life. He disappeared on Jan. 10, and his body was found in the East River on Sunday.

No one really knows what's in the mind of a person who commits suicide, yet Mr. Gray had spent years telling us just what was on his mind. The image that will stay with most of us is a picture of Mr. Gray talking and talking, anchored by a plain table, with a sheaf of notes at hand. It's conventional to think of Mr. Gray as relentlessly autobiographical. And yet the real autobiography in his monologues wasn't what he said so much as the way he connected what he was saying. Profound suffering was only an ellipsis away from comic anxiety.

"And so" is the kind of phrase he used a lot, because it allowed him to go anywhere he wanted in his monologues. It allowed him to weave a story around the story he found impossible to tell, the one without language that led him to take his own life.