Graham is smart and funny and a good writer, but I think trying a little too hard. The first half of the book is self-consciously humorous. She settles down eventually, but the trying-to-please doesn't entirely go away. It feels frenetic at times, the way overcaffeinated Lorelai Gilmore does at times, and it makes you wonder how much of Graham Gilmore really is.
The book is part memoir, part essays, with an emphasis on the two Gilmore Girls runs. Some of my favorite passages are unabashedly feminist, like when Graham describes the range of roles she played before her big break: Gals About Town (GATs) and Mom ("tired," "beleaguered," or possessing a "faded beauty."
While the GATs usually have tons of personality traits and quirks, The Moms aren't usually as specific. Almost every Mom I've played has a scene where she folds laundry. The GATs never do this. ... Sometimes members of the crew on a Mom project won't even use my character name but will just refer to me as "The Mom."
She has a theory about that,which involves advertising and catching young women before their taste in paper towels has gelled.
She also points out that sexism reveals itself in the fact that every film she's ever done was directed by a man and that hotter women get parts she auditions for all the time. She got a fresh taste of Hollywood and non-Hollywood sexism when she published her novel Someday, Someday Maybe and people thought it was either an autobiography or ghostwritten, and people assumed that if it would be developed for TV that someone else would write the script. Even she assumed that.
It's cute how she shares that Gilmore Girls return was a big sobfest for her. She was emotional throughout. I'm hoping that was at least a little because she was perimenopausal.
Being friends with a designer and art director, I was interested to read that the sets had to be completely reconstructed from film, not drawings. Were there really no CAD files to take measurements from? I know the decorators took a billion Polaroids? What happens to them when a show is done? Does the television industry need some archives help? Let me know. I'm not an archivist myself, but I know a bunch, and I could probably learn how to preserve shows for research and reboots.