“I get tired of talking about myself,” says Spalding Gray midway through Steven Soderbergh’s new documentary about the late monologist, “so the conversations with the audience are a way of talking to other people . . . and hopefully empathizing with other people.” What follows is a moving yet deeply ironic clip of Gray interviewing a middle-aged woman as part of his well-known performance, Interviewing the Audience. Gray originated this piece in the early 1980s, when he was roughly forty years old.
     “Did you ever try to kill yourself?” Gray asks the woman seated onstage.
     “No,” she replies without hesitation. “Life’s so short that it’s the least you can do to hang in.” Gray seems taken aback by her certainty. “You’ve really never thought about it?” he repeats. The woman explains that her ex-husband recently killed himself. His fatal act left her very angry, even though they had not spoken in over a year. “If you can’t make it any other way,” she states matter-of-factly, “you can do it that way.”
     Soderbergh is a master of incongruous moments. While this segment begins with Gray’s expressed desire for connection to people outside of himself, he clearly cannot grasp his interlocutor’s aversion to suicide. His face grows troubled—even dumbstruck—when his female audience member dismisses killing oneself as an easy way out.
     By contrast, Soderbergh and his crew embrace Gray’s lifelong fascination with self-induced death. On one level, the documentary functions as a visual chronology of Gray’s reflections on this topic. Soderbergh begins with a shot of Gray’s iconic wooden desk. Gray sits behind it, opens his notepad, and sips from a glass of water. Most fans will instantly recognize the ensuing material as Sex and Death to the Age 14 (1979), his first autobiographical monologue. I, for one, can almost recite Gray’s comic account of how his mother comforted his older brother Rocky when he could not fall asleep:
     “Mom, when I die, will it be forever?”
     “Yes dear.”
     “Mom, when I die, will it be forever and ever?”
     “Mm-hmm, dear.”
     Soderbergh unsettles this familiar narrative about Gray’s childhood by intercutting more jarring footage of an older Gray discussing what it was like to grow up with a mentally ill mother. “Denial was the most difficult thing,” the performer tells an unidentified interviewer. To illustrate, Gray recalls playing in the house with other neighborhood children while his mother “shrieked in the kitchen, crying out. No one would say, ‘Was that your mother?’ We were all afraid.”
     As followers of Soderbergh surely know by now, what makes this documentary unique (and a bit strange) is that Gray’s voice is the organizing principle. I saw And Everything is Going Fine at the IFC Center in New York on 6 April 2010. During a Q/A session after the screening, Soderbergh said he began with “90 hours of unique material” documenting Gray’s life and career. Unlike many traditional efforts to document reality, however, this project includes no expert opinions or posthumous interviews with people who knew Gray well. Instead, we get 89 minutes of Gray talking—mostly onstage or in film roles, but occasionally in the context of an interview with the media or a friend.
     Some audience members questioned this mode of narrative by noting the absence of pivotal figures like the Wooster Group founder Elizabeth LeCompte, who helped to create the form of Gray’s monologues by instructing him to sit at a table and tell the audience about himself during the first part of Nayatt School (1978). I understand the call for a greater range of voices and perspectives. Nevertheless, I agree with Soderbergh’s sense that “there wasn’t a better way to tell the story than to have Gray tell it.” Conveyed any other way, this documentary would quickly succumb to the burdens of closure. And in the service of closure, Soderbergh would have little choice but to position Gray’s loved ones and colleagues as analysts who can somehow explain or justify his terminal act.