Spalding Gray wasn't a chrome dome in his narratives.

As a raconteur, Gray was often witty, uproarious even, but there was always a baseline existentialism at work underneath, so that he could drop a Heidegger reference ("Why is there something and not nothing?") into a riff on childbirth without coming across like an egghead.

Isn't any underlying existential baseline, really an abyss?