February 10th: André Gregory in conversation with Joan Wickersham
Presented by 192 Books and Paula Cooper Gallery, André Gregory will discuss his new book This is Not My Memoir with Joan Wickersham and talk about his most treasured reads.
The live event will stream directly on this page on Wednesday, February 10th at 6pm EST. There is no login or rsvp required. A recording will be posted shortly afterwards. During the broadcast, please email your questions to evan@192books.com.
This is Not My Memoir (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2020)
This is Not My Memoir tells the life story of André Gregory, iconic theatre director, writer, and actor. For the first time, Gregory shares memories from a life lived for art, including stories from the making of My Dinner with André. Taking on the dizzying, wondrous nature of a fever dream, This is Not My Memoir includes fantastic and fantastical stories that take the reader from wartime Paris to golden-age Hollywood, from avant-garde theaters to monasteries in India. Along the way we meet Jerzy Grotowski, Helene Weigel, Gregory Peck, Gurumayi Chidvilasananda, Wallace Shawn, and many other larger-than-life personalities.
This is Not My Memoir is a collaboration between Gregory and Todd London who create a portrait of an artist confronting his later years. Here, too, are the reflections of a man who only recently learned how to love. What does it mean to create art in a world that often places little value on the process of creating it? And what does it mean to confront the process of aging when your greatest work of art may well be your own life?
André Gregory has been directing in New York for more than half a century. He has collaborated on film adaptions of his theatre productions with Wallace Shawn, Louis Malle, and Jonathan Demme. The now-legendary My Dinner with André was created by Gregory, Shawn, and Malle. Gregory is also an actor, writer, teacher, and painter.
Joan Wickersham is the author of The Suicide Index, a National Book Award finalist, and The News from Spain. Her fiction has appeared in The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Nonrequired Reading; and she is a regular op-ed columnist for The Boston Globe. Her current project, “Conversations with a Shipwreck,” created with the photographer Adam Davies, will open online through Scandinavia House in March 2021.