Talking As Fast As I Can: From Gilmore Girls to Gilmore Girls (and Everything in Between)

Published in 2016, Talking as Fast as I Can: From Gilmore Girls to Gilmore Girls (and Everything in Between) is a memoir by American actress and author, Lauren Graham. The book uses the filming of the show for which Graham is best known (Gilmore Girls) and the reboot of that show as a framework to tell the story of her rise in Hollywood and to describe the hardships and joys that she faced along the way. 

Graham is best known for her role of Lorelai Gilmore on Gilmore Girls and Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life, and she also played the role of Sarah Braverman on the television show Parenthood. This book received the Goodreads Choice Award for Readers’ Favorite Humor in 2017. Graham has also authored three other books: a novel titled Someday, Someday, Maybe, and the nonfiction books In Conclusion, Don’t Worry About It and Have I Told You This Already? Stories I Don’t Want to Forget to Remember. 

This guide refers to the 2017 edition by Ballentine Books, an imprint of Random House.

Summary

Graham begins by describing her early childhood. She was born in Hawaii, then moved to Japan, where her mother’s family lived. When her parents separated, she moved back to the United States to live with her dad. By the time Graham was enrolled in kindergarten, she already knew how to read because her dad read to her every night. After much debate, she was allowed to skip ahead to the first grade. Graham decided then that she had been given the gift of an extra year and would choose to save it until the perfect time came.

After graduating with an English degree from Barnard, Graham decided to use her extra year to pursue acting in New York City. However, this plan proved to be much more difficult than she anticipated, and she ended up applying to graduate schools instead. Graham discovered that every artist’s journey is different, and she needn’t feel as if she had wasted her extra year. Instead, Graham began to adopt a practice of gratitude for the things that improved her as an artist and as a person. 

Graham held many jobs before she became a well-known actor in Gilmore Girls. The book follows her time as an intern at the Barn Theater in Michigan, the endless auditioning for commercials, and time working at a Mexican restaurant in Brooklyn. Graham never forgets her more humble beginnings, and states to readers that if she needed to, she would immediately go back to waiting tables. These chapters are excellent material for other young artists to read, so they will not only know of the rewards of the entertainment industry, but the grind that is required to make it in Hollywood.

When Graham initially got the role of Lorelai Gilmore on Gilmore Girls, some of her friends feared that it would prematurely age her. Graham discusses the different stereotypical roles available for women, and how women more often have a shorter timespan in which they are cast in roles. Even though there was a bit of a risk in playing a mom role in her early thirties, Graham felt confident that she was perfect for the role. She was proven right, and soon the show, which initially had to compete for views with Friends, the most watched TV show at the time, was given its own great airing time slot after it proved a success.

From there, Graham found an incredible community with her Gilmore Girls cast and crew, and the acting challenge she had craved. Gilmore Girls is known for being a show where the characters speak at an incredibly fast pace (which is where the title of the book came from), and the themes surrounding motherhood, family, and friendship resonated with viewers. The legacy of the show lasted long past the final airdate, which is what made returning to the show for the reboot so much more special for creative members and audiences alike.

Graham also writes about how her life did not unfold in the timeline she imagined for herself. She was older than she thought she would be when she started dating Peter Krause, who starred with her on another well-loved show, Parenthood. Graham tells readers that they should not get so caught up with their dreams happening in a certain time frame, but instead learn to plan while also being flexible; the plans they make may not be nearly as wonderful as what life has in store, it may just not happen as fast as they want it to happen.

This is a recurring theme in the book: being present in the moment and not wanting to skip ahead, or not being consumed by technology. Graham was a teenager and young adult in the 1970s and 1980s, meaning that people were not as focused on social media, texting, and other cellphone activities as they are today. Graham hilariously talks about an alter ego she invented called Old Lady Jackson who warns her younger co-stars to slow down every now and then. If her advice is not seen as cool, it can be blamed on Old Lady Jackson; Lauren Graham is cool with it, but Old Lady Jackson worries that they are missing out on life.

This perspective comes from getting older, and makes filming the reboot of Gilmore Girls mean so much more than it did the first time. When Graham herself was younger, she did not appreciate, nor could she foresee, how much of an impact the show would have on the world at large, and on her as an individual involved in making it. The friendships and memories she made the first time around feel more sacred and sentimental when, eight years later, she gets to reunite with the cast and creator of the show, Amy Sherman-Palladino. Throughout the final chapter of the book, which is a diary of sorts that Graham later reveals was written first, readers are given a chance to see what it was like on set.

The return to Gilmore Girls is a bittersweet one. The set had been torn down because the lot was needed for other shows, so it was mostly reconstructed. Alexis Bledel, who was brand new to acting when she was cast as Lauren Graham’s on-screen daughter, Rory, is older and much more experienced now. Most heartbreaking for the entire team is the loss of Ed Herrmann, who played Lauren’s father onscreen, Richard Gilmore. Instead of replacing him in the reboot, creator Amy Sherman-Palladino wrote his death into the story, and a good bit of the plot has the characters of Lorelai, Kelly Bishop’s Emily (Lorelai’s mother and wife to Richard) and Rory dealing with the death of this instrumental family member. Between the very real grief over Ed Herrmann, and the chance to revisit a character she never thought she’d return to, Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life is filled with both happy and sad tears.

From her young days as a kid listening to Judy Garland musicals, to her first job at the Barn Theater, to grad school, to television, and finally to getting published as an author, Graham has learned the art of letting go, growing up, and embracing the beautiful unknown of the future. In this book, she invites readers to do the same.