Morning, Noon, and Night

The hilarious new monologue about fatherhood, by the author of It's a Slippery Slope

In Morning, Noon and Night that master of the confessional, Spalding Gray, tells the event-filled, emotionally charged and outrageously funny story of one day of his life in October 1997, after the birth of his son Theo. Horrified by the prospect of having another son, considering what he and his two brothers did to their father, and ambivalent about the idea of living in a small, quaint town on eastern Long Island that seems an odd detour for a man destined for California, Spalding comes to feel, of course, a profound affinity for his baby boy, born with the looks of "a wet, blue beaver." But this is not merely a father's account of an infant son; it's the story of his new life with his girlfriend Kathie; his regally precocious eleven-year-old stepdaughter, Marissa ("Please don't let me die a virgin!"); and his older son, Forrest, who stymies Spalding time and again with his metaphysical inquisitiveness: "Daddy, what's behind the stars?" "How do flies celebrate?" Cosmic questions that for Gray are reinforced by the view from his bedroom window-a seventeenth-century graveyard-a cold reminder to the author of the impermanence of things, the transient nature of his life, the strange calling of his profession, which brilliantly confirms Wordsworth's dictum that the child is father to the man.
A richly comic work about parenthood , about adults who don't grow up and children who do, that stands as Spalding Gray's most mature work to date.