Decades after his famous dinner, the once-restless André Gregory writes of inner peace
"This Is Not My Memoir" by Andre Gregory and Todd London; FSG (212 pages, $27)
___
To philosophize, as philosophers have told us, is to learn how to live and how to die. For Andre Gregory, a stage director with a deep ruminative streak, the purpose of theater is to awaken the self, that mysterious patchwork of being and nothingness.
It's a subject that has long preoccupied him, as anyone who has seen "My Dinner With Andre" can attest. The 1981 Louis Malle film, in which Gregory plays a version of himself in a Platonic dialogue with Wallace Shawn about the search for meaning through art, is composed of lengthy anecdotes about a spiritually restless director's far-flung explorations into his own soul.
The self-engrossed Gregory of "My Dinner With Andre" was in the midst of a Dantesque midlife crisis. The Gregory who emerges in his autobiographical first book, "This Is Not My
