Willy and Liz act like a couple more, and it’s strange for me to watch but very necessary for growth in the form of knowledge. I see her treating him like a boy, like a child. . . . I miss that from her, but a big part of me doesn’t want it anymore, doesn’t trust it anymore. Liz is a mother, and she nurtures well, and then she moves on. In a way, she has nurtured me through the big crisis of birth after India. She got me on my feet for my own work — 12 years, a very long slow painful birth. Now I see that Willem needs her, and she responds to that need like any good mother. If I could see this more clearly. The most I can give her is to let her go . . . let her do this, and I also see that I have no choice. The FORCE is in motion. I put it in motion as much as she did. We are all in this changing water together. I like Willem, but it is difficult for me to listen to him talk. I like him for his natural way of existence . . . his just being there for Liz. I think he is very good for her. A big part of me wants to see it work. I want her to be happy.

The old problem of doubt back on me again. Do I really have something to say, or is it Liz who is saying it just like Richard? Am I just an actor, a vehicle through which other people’s ideas pass?

Difficult adjustment to Willem and the movies [this is in reference to Dafoe’s small uncredited role in Michael Cimino’s film “Heaven’s Gate”] — some jealousy. I want them to want me . . . fear of getting lost in some intellectual ART world — associations of Hollywood as being a working-class world — theater for the people — fears of isolating myself in this little gay, fancy SoHo world — looking at Willem as a FRESH meat-and-potatoes man. Another time of confusion for me. Willem going away brings it all up again — not so much the glamour but a theater for the people — working on the BIG American myth — repulsed by my subjectivism. I am stuck in this constant doubt. . . always reflecting and always in doubt. This doubt does not have a crack to seep into when we all work together, but now Willy has made a crack in the boat. I made plans to go on with my solo piece, “Sex and Death Up Until Age 14.”; I know I must keep working. When I don’t ­— when there is no action, I am swallowed up in fear and doubt.

Have Liz or I or both of us been working under the grand illusion that we were individually artistic in temperament and that would not dry up even if there was no group supporting us? Willy’s movie is now causing a fear and depression among us all. It makes it hard for me to work because I am constantly working under the knowledge of a sense of loss, also mad and sick fantasies that I could have been a “great actor” in the films.

Liz says Chan [Gray’s younger brother] seems well. I would not know. So often I feel so involved in myself that I don’t see others. I have to face what more seems to be the truth — that I could only love Liz to the extent that she was incorporated into ME, my work, my fears . . . all these years I’ve used her to PROP me up . . . to keep me alive, and now it’s all being shaken and threatened by her relationship with Willem. Now I must be strong and take a good look at it. I feel now like I’m re-entering that HELL that was before I met Liz. I feel like a lost child again, but before, I had my youth to go on, and now I only see loneliness and old age and then I think — let go of it all — just give up on human love and put it all into ART; and when I think that way, it all looks barren . . . I feel like I will die without Liz. The worst thought is that Liz having our baby might save us. Oh HELP on that one. I need distance? I’m just like all the rest. I’m in the WORLD THAT IS.

On April 20, 1979, when he was 37, Gray’s first solo show, “Sex and Death to the Age 14,” made its debut at the Performing Garage. The show ran for a month and a half. He took the idea of using a wooden table from “Nayatt School” but shrank it down to the size of a desk. “I sat behind that desk,” Gray wrote in the book version of the show, “with a little notebook containing an outline of all I could remember about sex and death up until I was 14 years old.” He improvised the story for his audience, tape-recording each show, and adjusted his outline afterward. The story gradually grew from 40 minutes to 1 hour 20 minutes.

It was around this time that Gray met Renée Shafransky, 26, who worked as program director of the Collective for Living Cinema, an artist-run cooperative and theater for experimental film in downtown Manhattan. Gray begins writing about Shafransky in the early days of their romance, with the two of them ricocheting between a strong attraction and a reluctance to get seriously involved.