“I WAS THIRTY-THREE and couldn’t get a job as a dogcatcher. As if flaming out of three theaters and provoking Gregory Peck to slug me weren’t bad enough, I had accepted a job to direct a play about bestiality on Broadway. Leda Had a Little Swan was, to my knowledge, the first play in Broadway history to close the night before it opened. It also sealed my reputation as a lunatic…”

This is Not My Memoir is the life story of the iconic director, writer, actor, and co-creator of My Dinner With André. Taking the form of a wondrous fever dream, this autobiography-of-sorts presents fantastic and fantastical recollections from the director who changed theater forever with his Manhattan Project, who once drove a fire truck onto the stage in the middle of an opening night, and who has been willingly buried alive.

The book takes the reader from pre-war Europe to golden-age Hollywood, from avant-garde New York to monasteries in India. Throughout, André reflects on the role of the artist in society, and also shares the personal and spiritual struggles that brought him past the edge of despair. André Gregory, as he sees himself, is a man who has lived for art but who only recently learned how to love.

This Is Not My Memoir is a collaboration between Gregory and writer Todd London, who create a portrait of an experimental artist confronting his later years. What does it mean to create art in a world that often places little value in 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?