Gilroy's book, I Wake Up Screening!: Everything You Need to Know about Making Independent Films, Including a Thousand Reasons Not To (1993), offers a rather bleak perspective on the independent film industry. He penned this work while simultaneously directing, producing, and distributing four independent feature films.

In Gilroy’s Plays: Selections, Vol. 1, Complete Full-Length Plays, 1962–1999 (2000), seven complete plays are included: The Subject Was Roses, Who’ll Save the Plowboy? (1962), That Summer—That Fall (1967), The Only Game in Town (1968), Last Licks (1979), Any Given Day (1993), and Contact with the Enemy (1999).

Terrence Real's How Can I Get Through to You: Reconnecting Men and Women (2002) is a valuable resource for those in close relationships. The book, written by a psychotherapist, examines the issues affecting modern marriages and offers guidance for enhancing them.

Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1962), produced on Broadway just two years before The Subject Was Roses, is another domestic drama depicting a troubled marriage. Regarded as Albee’s finest play, it is more intense and brutal than Gilroy’s work. The couple in the play concocts falsehoods about their lives and engage in manipulative mental games to navigate the suffering of their existence.