“The Journals of Spalding Gray” edited by Nell Casey (Knopf, 340 pgs., $28.95)

Skiing is better than sex, Spalding Gray once said, “because for me a good round of sex might be seven minutes. Skiing you can do for seven hours.”

Gray brought the invigorating ease of a gifted downhill skier to his autobiographical monologues, the best of them — “Swimming to Cambodia” — made into a film in 1987 by Jonathan Demme.

The stories were often electric. Sparks seemed to leap between Gray’s arched eyebrows, as if each were a battery terminal, as if he were getting a dirty thrill out of being onstage. His confessional performances felt like something new.

Gray committed suicide in 2004, at 62, apparently by leaping from the Staten Island Ferry. He had been an insecure, searching and troubled man his entire life, and he poured his uneasy feelings into a journal for nearly 40 years. This writing has been condensed into “The Journals of Spalding Gray,” edited by Nell Casey.

This is a beautiful book: handsome, well made, exceedingly well edited. What it doesn’t happen to be is a good book. In his journals, Gray is the one thing he never allowed himself to be on stage: uninteresting.

If you stick with “The Journals of Spalding Gray,” there is a reward of sorts at the end. But the moments when a charismatic operator like this one finds peace and grace are usually the most pat and platitudinous parts of any memoir or journal.