Thank you to NetGalley and Strauss and Giroux for providing the eARC for this memoir. I first became interested in Andre Gregory in college, where a philosophy professor has us watch "My Dinner with Andre". He proved to be a very interesting character, and I appreciate the background this memoir gave into his life. Well worth a read!

Really fun and entertaining!! Gregory's style is so smooth and easy to keep up with. What I loved most is that it reads so easily which helped me understand what kind of life he had lived all these years especially since I didn't know much about him before reading this book.

A short, fascinating look into the musings of Andre Gregory, an exceptionally talented actor/director. The book is written almost as a stream of consciousness style; or at least reads that way. The narrative wanders through subjects which seem to be on Gregory’s mind at the time of writing.
There is some history that describes life for him as his family escaped the Nazi’s as well as some information regarding his reportedly unhappy childhood. There are also details about his first marriage to Chiquita which, based on the writings, seemed to be more a mutual partnership/friendship than one of deep love. After Chiquita’s death, Gregory determined he was done with love and marriage; that is until he met Cindy, his second wife. With his second wife he details having discovered love in a totally different way.
There are many short episodes in the book, like the story of his going to an Ashram and meeting a famous guru that offer insights into a life filled with exploration, creativity, and individuality. Some of the more recent stories detail Gregory’s latest endeavor of taking up painting and his unique beliefs regarding how he paints and what painting has done for the development of his soul.
As a brief history of a person’s life, this book is both interesting and engaging. Also, for anyone aging, there may be some kernels offered of how to approach that process as well as encouragement to continue opening up and allowing one’s self to be changed by new experiences. Regardless of what the reader’s approach is toward this book, there is bound to be some information or encouragement or enlightenment they find within the pages. My thanks to Farrar, Straus, and Giroux for providing me an advanced copy for review through NetGalley. The opinions expressed here are entirely my own.

In the course of reading a memoir one has to observe what the author puts in and what the author leaves out.
Then there is the factor of letting the reader be somewhat entertained by what the author decided to put in.

Not my Memoir can be best described as having a feeling of ennui after ones reading. Page after page of sheer boredom that one almost feels sorry for the author. After all it is not the authors fault that the mother seems to be indifferent towards her own children and on her death bed stated that it would be better off if she didn't have children at all while having affairs one after another is fine with her as long as those children are not around.
Then there is the wife Chiquita whom seem to hate everything.
Is it the authors fault that the plays he puts on seem to not find an audience? Maybe it is or just maybe he put on the wrong play or didn't go with the what those in the suites wanted.

Not My Memoir is not an entertaining read.
Then again it's author has shown the reader that life is not entertaining as the reader expects it to be.

Start with a funny story about the stripper that you worked for in Boston, and I'll gladly follow you for 224 pages.

Now that the pandemic has made it more difficult to buy more books than I can read, I now download more books than I can read instead. One day recently, even though I have a pile of unread books (both paper and electronic), I downloaded free advance review copies of this and two other new books from Netgalley as well as a classic of 20th Century literature from the library. I started all four, and this is the one that grabbed me and said: “Abandon all other books and read me! Neglect all others! Have fun! Enjoy yourself! Read the reflections of a completely charming and articulate self-centered lunatic!”

That's the sort of book you need mid-pandemic. I tore through it in three days.

But I was sorry that the stripper and her burlesque club had long disappeared by the time I appeared in Boston in the late 1970s. I would really have loved to see what she did with those blackbirds.

Reading Andre Gregory is like spending time with a particularly crazy and undisciplined friend. In some ways, though, reading Andre Gregory is superior, since real-life crazy and undisciplined friends often ask for loans and/or engage in unsightly personal drama in your presence.

If you've seen the movie My Dinner with Andre, it is very easy to hear Gregory's voice coming off of the page of this book as he narrates events. That's good – he has a pleasant voice. Some of events are slight variants on the tales told in Andre, and some are completely different, if not surprising, because they often consist (like his narrative in the movie) of his going off in some unlikely direction, based on a momentary whim or inexplicable impulse: “I am an intuitive animal, and I don't ever really know what I am doing” (Kindle location 2310).

I enjoy people like Gregory, but if you are the type of reader who wants to read about people who are relentlessly admirable, calm, and reasonable, then perhaps this book is not for you. For example, he seems to have rather harsh words for his parents, who after all got the Gregory family out of Europe one step ahead of Hitler and then indulgently funded Gregory's global travels, Manhattan apartment, and even sometimes artistic projects.

He also tends to put himself unduly at the enter of things. For example, there is a longish and interesting story about at time long ago when Gregory Peck hired Andre Gregory to do some theater directing in Los Angeles. I won't attempt to explain the details, but the story ends with some speculation that this episode led eventually to election of Donald Trump. “I should rot in hell,” Gregory concludes (location 783).

Similarly, toward the end, the book contains the text of a letter that Andre Gregory wrote to his friend the photographer Richard Avedon, who had died years before, after the two had quarrelled. I guess a person of more mundane sentimental sensibilities (like self) might have written something like “O friend, I miss you so much now that you are gone, I shouldn't have quarrelled with you, please forgive me.” Gregory, however, writes a letter that says: “I miss you, but I was right all long.”

Gregory has what I am pleased to call “retrospective reasonableness”. He accurately describes past behavior in his life as unreasonable, self-indulgent, etc., but when a new opportunity to presents itself, he seems to lack the ability to learn from his mistakes and say, for example, “In the past, I abandoned my long-suffering life and vulnerable children for months on end, and then felt bad about it. Maybe this time I'll just stay in Manhattan and find some classic play to present in a new and audience-alienating manner.”

As mentioned above, this may be why reading Gregory's memoir might be a superior and more stability-making experience than, say, being a member of his immediate family or intimate friend. But I must admit, Gregory seems like someone who would be fun to spend a little time with and this is a basic requirement for a compelling book of recollections.

If I ever have to compose my biography sometime, I'll pick Andre's writing style for sure, so quirky. I selected this autobiographical work as it's a very long time ago I read one in this genre. Though not much of an enthusiast of this style, I went in all blind for reading it. And I was pretty impressed. The book recounts all that he's lived through, the positives as well as the negatives, so it's not just the goody-goody stuff.

Halfway into the book, I observed that the chronology/delivery could be better because it got me puzzling co-relating all the happenings on separate occasions. The book cover could also be improved. Nonetheless, the novel is a big motivation for all the artists starting out. Andre clearly specifies that age is never a factor if it comes to starting something new. Overall, quite a pleasant and fascinating read.

Thank you, NetGalley, for the ARC copy of this book.

When André Gregory was young, he tells us, his mother had an affair with movie star Errol Flynn. When he was younger, his parents served him caviar so excessively that he was hospitalized for malnutrition. Before he was born, his father had escaped the Soviet Union to Berlin as a sales representative for IG Farben, the chemical conglomerate that a decade later developed the gas used in Nazi death camps — and then escaped Nazi Germany because he was Jewish. André Gregory was born in 1934 in Paris, which his family then also escaped.

“By the time my family arrived in America I had experienced so much—violence, dictatorship (including within my family), war, and flight. I already had so many stories to tell. That was my initiation into the world of the artist,” Gregory writes near the beginning of This Is Not My Memoir (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 210 pages.) The Dada title fits. If the stories in the book about his parents feel improbable, like a child’s fantasy, there are plenty of moments in his subsequent account of his adult life as an avant-garde director and occasional actor where the reader may be tempted to stop and ask: Is he putting us on?

Gregory teases us with that possibility in the very first story of the book, about how, as a freshman at Harvard, he worked as an assistant to a burlesque stripper named Princess Totem Pole, feeding the large blackbirds that stripped off her clothes as part of her act. “After telling people this story for years, I decided that it was so unbelievable, so outrageous, that it could not possibly have happened. I must have made it up. So I stopped telling it.” Stories, he writes, “are slippery creatures…filtered over time through the prism of selective memory.” But at the end of this first chapter he recounts meeting a classmate years later who reminded him of his moonlighting with the Princess. “So it was true all along,” he writes.

In the 37 short chapters that follow, we’re told many stories — about how he physically held up the ailing Billie Holiday throughout her last public concert before she died; how his wife of 33 years Chiquita as a toddler inspired Carmen Miranda’s Chiquita Banana jingle; how Gregory Peck slugged him after Gregory told him he acted like a Wooden Indian; how he was buried alive on fashion photographer Richard Avedon’s Montauk property in an elaborate ritual that I assume was some kind of performance art; how Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver was the only adult member of the audience to like his production of Tartuffe.

He writes about his “inexplicable encounters with the inexplicable.” Some of these stories approach parody – intentionally or not, I’m not sure. He tells us of traveling to the Tunisian Sahara with a Japanese Buddhist priest, which he somehow though would inspire him to do a stage adaption of The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s story of being plane-wrecked in the desert. “One night, desperate, we just started to eat sand. We just ate sand and threw up. Then we gave up the project and went home.”

André Gregory is surely best known as the riveting raconteur, world-traveling bon vivant and dabbler in New Age spirituality of the 1981 movie “My Dinner with André,” which was created and performed with his long-time collaborator Wallace Shawn. While he assures us that he is not that André — that was a character he helped create for the film — he is unquestionably a colorful character in the book as well. He has a new collaborator for this book, Todd London, who is a respected theater artist, academic and author in his own right. But Gregory’s co-author is even more self-effacing that Shawn was in the movie; London doesn’t exist at all in the narrative (nor even in Gregory’s acknowledgements page; London doesn’t mention Gregory in his either, which makes me suspect there’s an untold story here.)

“This Is Not My Memoir,” however, is more than just a collection of remarkable stories. It also chronicles Gregory’s theatrical career in such a way that we get a clear description of some landmark experimental theater – and not just his own — without the impenetrable jargon that often accompanies such accounts. He visited Bertolt Brecht’s theater in East Germany and Jerzy Grotowski’s in Poland, and learned important lessons from each. “My God, could Grotowski’s actors move! Each one could move twenty or thirty muscles in the face alone, so there was no barrier between an emotional impulse and the physical expression of that impulse.”

He takes us through some of the over-the-top or in-your-face productions that got him fired — “Firebugs” in Seattle (which included a actual fire engine driven onto the stage), “Beclch” in Philadelphia (fired, even though he founded the company), Tartuffe and The Glass Menagerie in Los Angeles (because he cast a Black actor as the Gentleman Caller) — and also those that made his reputation, such as his adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s Alice books. He recounts how he organized his theater company the Manhattan Project, so-called because they figured they would bomb. He tells us what the drove the theater (“We wanted to make theater about theater, the way action painting is about the event of painting, the way a circus is about the acts”), what it accomplished, and how painful it was to disband eight years later. He writes about “Vanya on 42nd Street” was made into a movie. He lets us into his process, which he admits is unusual: He rehearses his productions not for weeks but for years.

He also talks at length about “My Dinner With Andre,” and specifically cites this YouTube video from the movie:



Almost forty years later, he writes “Fascism can happen anywhere. I smell it today in America. I hope to God I’m wrong.”

Yes, he also writes about his gurus and his psychological and spiritual journeys, but not insufferably. In fact, he dips into his spiritual learning to offer what I count as some down-to-earth wisdom.

“I’ve read that the Buddha believed we are always in a state of bliss or ecstasy. Three things get in the way of that ecstasy: rage, envy, and illusion. Normally, that would have seemed like religious gobbledygook. Suddenly I thought, Oh yes, I get it. I’m in a rage about getting older. I envy everyone who is younger. And I live with the illusion that I can live forever. Since reading that, my eighties feel just fine.”

Now 86, he does make a convincing case that his life is happier now than it was in his youth, and for the first time, he says, filled with love. After the death of his first wife, he remarried a much younger woman, a filmmaker who made a documentary about her husband, “Andre Gregory: Before and After Dinner.” He has taken up painting as a hobby. “Plays tend to be sad affairs, which I try to lighten with laughter. My drawing, though, is all laughter.”

“This Is Not My Memoir” is not a book that goes into much depth about anybody or anything except André Gregory himself. I would like to have learned more, for example, about his collaboration with Wallace Shawn, “one of the longest collaborations—director/actor and playwright/actor—in the history of the American theater,” he writes. “Forty-five years and only one fight.” While the book proceeds more or less chronologically, a more scattershot and unfocused look at his current life is threaded throughout the book and takes up the last fourth of it, as if reflecting his conscious choice later in life to take it easier.

Still, I can’t imagine getting past the first sentence of any other book that begins “When I was a freshman in Harvard….” and getting to the very finish with the feeling that I’ve been entertained, and maybe even a little enlightened, by somebody worth knowing.

I've never read a story about the apasianized and busy being a director in the film industry..
This man's life was certainly marked with the highs and lows.
His creative problems, his differences with his colleagues, his duties as a father, his wife's cancer, going through grief and having to go beyond conflicts so he can continue to do what most passionate about him with all his high and risky price.
absolutely is the kind of director/writer behind a big stardom in film. We need to look for the same or better initiatives when it comes to amplifying voices or stories turned into gold to stay in the story

Thanks Netgalley for this (again)

Andre Gregory is an theater director and actor known for his strong personality and manic dialogues. His most famous role was in the film My Dinner with Andre starring his friend Wallace Shawn. This book describes his childhood in a Russian Jewish immigrant family, his father's successful real estate career in Los Angeles, and his struggling career as a theater director. He was fired often and once had a physical altercation with Gregory Peck. There many that Gregory is not, but an telling enthralling tales is his strong suit.

"...Theater is a metaphor for life. You get kicked onto the stage, you struggle for a few hours with your problems and those of the people playing scenes with you, and then you exit. The curtain falls and usually, the play is forgotten, just as I will be forgotten…"

What a charming and interesting book. So glad Gregory took the time to get his story down, to have a chance to spread his experience and wisdom to all of us, not just artists and the like. In spite of knowing and respecting Gregory’s work in theater and film, I nonetheless was pleasantly surprised at how well the book was written and its importance to the continuing study of life and art.

"...We were always terrific friends and always extremely supportive of the other’s desires and needs. We were not so much husband and wife as brother and sister. Hansel and Gretel, two terrified children desperately holding hands, alone in a frightening wood, always ready for the big bad wolf…"

Gregory was genuinely appreciative of his late wife and honored her with his words. A man born of privilege, Gregory chose to live his life artistically and as fully as humanly possible. The fact that some of his rehearsals continued unabated for up to a dozen years before their premiere on stage was astounding. His relationship with Wallace Shawn was as warm and sincere as they exhibited before the camera in their seminal film My Dinner with André.

"...In relationships as in art, it is not talent that matters much. It is tenacity. An artist cannot survive or grow without tenacity…"

André Gregory speaks the truth. And he practiced tenacity his entire career. If nothing else, this memoir exhibits exactly the tenacity needed to succeed with no promise for desired results. But tenacity is central to every endeavor. Not just art.

"...By your seventies other men stop talking about their prostates and start talking about their knees. My arthritic right knee, for instance, sometimes buckles under me. This is the time, as a friend put it, “of the body’s little betrayals.”"

More truth. And as he said in this book, “The truth is not sad, it’s just the truth.” Certainly as we age, and if we live long enough, everything will be taken from us.

"...If death is all around us, how should we live? How do we find hope in the darkness? I believe— and this is very, very important to emphasize—that love is all, love of others, love of self, and even, perhaps, love of the process of letting go of life…"

Amen. Although the love of others is the hardest part for me now. In our country, the blind are leading the blind and it is frightening. The nightly news is no longer believed. Facts, and especially science, are ignored.

… “Absolute unmixed attention is prayer.”

For me, this is similar to what the poet Louis Glück describes in one of her essays on writing a poem. The immense concentration required to compose a poem of quality is the work an artist craves. Even as frustrating as it is, the concentration needed is the bulk of the reason for sitting down to write in the first place. Not in order to become famous, and certainly not to write a bestseller. It is simply to be again in the throes of such immense concentration. It is wonderful and insanely frustrating.

"...America has always been a money-grubbing country. We need to admit that ours is an extremely cruel country, too, built on the genocide of Native Americans, built by slavery, by dropping atom bombs. We have to admit our own cruelty, our own evil…'

Given the current state of affairs around the world with the coronavirus crisis it is important to note the timing of Gregory’s “not-memoir”. Not only was he spot-on at the very beginning of his book with his dire warnings regarding Trump as leader of our country, but the awful degradation since his election of common courtesy, civility, fairness, and a host of other concerns poised to destroy our country. The sooner we get rid of Trump and all his cronies, the better. Like the coronavirus, the Trump administration and his GOP lambs being led to their slaughter are an evil blight on the land. There isn’t enough disinfectant to rid us of their germ warfare. Bless André Gregory for speaking his truth, and thank you to the publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux for allowing him to do so under their masthead.

It's really hard to type something out that accurately describes this book. Gregory's life is unbelievable, filled with incredible tragedy and regret, but also filled to the brim with absolutely incredible events: Would you believe that he has a pretty substantial argument for being an unintentional cause of the Trump presidency? How about literally holding Billie Holiday up as she gives her final concert? Watching his mother drag a drunken Errol Flynn over to sign an autograph so that young Andre can save face at school? I've merely touched the surface. I could list stories for another ten minutes and fail to cover what you'd read about.

Gregory is one of our best (famous to the regular joe from MY DINNER WITH ANDRE, but cannot let that role in DEMOLITION MAN go unnoticed, just like Gregory), and here he proves how masterful of a storyteller he is. The book is a bonafide page-turner, and it's fantastic that he's chosen to share the stories of his life with us. I found myself giggling through one tale, saturated in poignancy the next, riddled with heartbreak at the one after, so on and so forth.

Lest this be confined to a traditional structure of an autobiography, a small but impactful change emerges in that he breaks many stories up, popping in for some not-quite-non-sequiturs.

Can't give it enough praise. It's what I wanted and more.

Many thanks to NetGalley and Farrar, Straus, & Giroux for the advance read.

Thank you Netgalley and publishers for sending me this arc. I will be reviewing this book.properly in the near future with an honest teview.

An intimate memoir,Andre Gregory shares moments memories from his life. This is a open honest look at his life his acting learning to love at a late age.A really personal open look at the authors life.success and failings.#netgalley#fsg

This is Not My Memoir is a beautiful and creative use of memory. I enjoyed this book a great deal and would recommend it highly.