Gray was raised in a Jewish family in New York City, the daughter of a salesman and a schoolteacher. She earned an M.A. in poetry from Boston University after which she spent several years teaching. While living in Oakland, she wrote a script for a play that had a successful run. She then moved to Los Angeles and enrolled in UCLA's screenwriting program during which she interned with the producer of .
Career
During Gray's internship at Star Trek, she re-wrote an episode which was used. In 1992, she wrote The Blouse Man based on her experiences vacationing in the Catskills for which she won the Samuel Goldwyn Writing Award. The script was not initially purchased until it was seen by actor Tony Goldwyn who was given the script by his agency, Creative Artists Agency. They tried to recruit David Seltzer as director but failed and they then agreed to let Goldwyn direct. This began a longtime collaboration between Gray as writer and Goldwyn as director. A Walk on the Moon was later adapted into a play and produced at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco. In a 2018 interview with Taylor Steinbeck, Gray reflected on the teenage zeitgeist the story represents:
The 1960s was an era similar to today when teenagers had a stake in what was happening politically. I’ve heard young gun control activists from Parkland, Florida, saying, “People of our age group haven’t had a voice since the ’60s.” Just like the kids of today, the kids in the ’60s didn’t trust their government, but they didn’t believe they were powerless. In Moon, Alison says that Woodstock is going to end the war in Vietnam. There was this belief in the power of youth.
You know Betty Anne's great survival skill—I realized getting to know her—her great survival skill is her understanding of what it means to love another person. That, to me, is her great heroism and the source of her courage and her strength. Betty Anne, because she just impulsively and instinctively loves the people in her life, she has this network of people that adore her.
Gray's film Megan Leavey tells the true story of a young woman who joins the Marines to escape her small New York town, and forms a bond with a combat dog named Rex. The film received positive reviews with 87% on Rotten Tomatoes. For television, Gray wrote episodes for Once and Again in 1999 and for The Divide in 2014.
