Mel Gussow, drama critic for the New York Times, first meets Beckett in Paris in 1978. They meet virtually once a year for the next ten years, the last time being in 1989 in the French nursing home where Beckett would die later that year.
This book is a record of those encounters. When they meet, it is often just after the playwright has directed - or Gussow has reviewed - one of Beckett's plays, so the talk is of actors and directors, the success or otherwise of various productions, and the general state of the theater, art, life - and tennis. None of these conversations has been published before, and they serve to show the reputedly austere author as modest, humorous, and open-minded but always precise and frequently revealing about his own work, which he discusses with great acuity.
Rounding off the book are interviews with Beckett's chief collaborators and interpreters: among them Bert Lahr, Gogo in the first American Godot; Jack MacGowran and Billie Whitelaw, Beckett's own favorite actors; directors Mike Nichols and Deborah Warner; and Edward Beckett, his nephew and literary executor.

Mel Gussow is a critic, author, and a cultural writer for The New York Times. A winnder of the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism, he is also the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship