Talking as Fast as I Can: From Gilmore Girls to Gilmore Girls (and Everything In Between)

Talking as Fast as I Can: From Gilmore Girls to Gilmore Girls (and Everything In Between)

by: Lauren Graham

Read by the author 

Listening length: 4 hours, 35 minutes 

Release date: November 29, 2016

Read date: April 27, 2023

My review: four out of five stars 

New York Times best seller

In this collection of personal essays, the beloved star of Gilmore Girls and Parenthood reveals stories about life, love, and working as a woman in Hollywood - along with behind-the-scenes dispatches from the set of the new Gilmore Girls, where she plays the fast-talking Lorelai Gilmore once again. In Talking as Fast as I Can, Lauren Graham hits pause for a moment and looks back on her life, sharing laugh-out-loud stories about growing up, starting out as an actress, and, years later, sitting in her trailer on the Parenthood set and asking herself, “Did you, um, make it?” She opens up about the challenges of being single in Hollywood (“Strangers were worried about me; that’s how long I was single!”), the time she was asked to audition her butt for a role, and her experience being a judge on Project Runway (“It’s like I had a fashion-induced blackout”).

In “What It Was Like, Part One”, Graham sits down for an epic Gilmore Girls marathon and reflects on being cast as the fast-talking Lorelai Gilmore. The essay “What It Was Like, Part Two” reveals how it felt to pick up the role again nine years later and what doing so has meant to her. Some more things you will learn about Lauren: She once tried to go vegan just to bond with Ellen DeGeneres, she’s aware that meeting guys at awards shows has its pitfalls (“If you’re meeting someone for the first time after three hours of hair, makeup, and styling, you’ve already set the bar too high”), and she’s a card-carrying REI shopper (“My bungee cords now earn points!”). Including photos and excerpts from the diary Graham kept during the filming of the recent Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life, this audiobook is like a cozy night in, catching up with your best friend, laughing and swapping stories, and - of course - talking as fast as you can.

If you love Gilmore girls, you will want to listen to Lauren's stories of how she remembers both the original and the follow up show. I loved hearing her inside stories and just about her life in general. Love that she was open and vulnerable about some of the choices she made as a young actress. It felt like a friend chatting with you about what's new in their life. I wonder if Alexis Bledel has a memoir...

Wild: From Lost to Found on The Pacific Crest Trail

Wild: From Lost to Found
on the Pacific Crest Trail

By: Cheryl Strayed
Narrated by Bernadette Dunne
Listening length: 13 hours, 2 minutes
Publicization date: March 20, 2012

My review: 3.5 out of 5 stars    

Read for my March 2023 Reading challenge, prompt 4: Women's history: about women, by women, for women. This one is about a woman, by a woman and read by another woman. =) 

Wild is a powerful, blazingly honest memoir: the story of an 1100-mile solo hike that broke down a young woman reeling from catastrophe - and built her back up again.

At 22, Cheryl Strayed thought she had lost everything. In the wake of her mother's death, her family scattered and her own marriage was soon destroyed. Four years later, with nothing more to lose, she made the most impulsive decision of her life: to hike the Pacific Crest Trail from the Mojave Desert through California and Oregon to Washington State - and to do it alone. She had no experience as a long-distance hiker, and the trail was little more than “an idea, vague and outlandish and full of promise.” But it was a promise of piecing back together a life that had come undone.

Strayed faced down rattlesnakes and black bears, intense heat and record snowfalls, and both the beauty and loneliness of the trail. Told with great suspense and style, sparkling with warmth and humor, Wild vividly captures the terrors and pleasures of one young woman forging ahead against all odds on a journey that maddened, strengthened, and ultimately healed her.


I have been putting off reading this book for so long until I finally saw that it was available on audiobook from my library! So, I listened to it. Not sure I would have finished it otherwise. I cannot believe how woefully unprepared she was for this trek. Strayed is beyond lucky that she wasn't badly injured or lost on the trail. I'm glad that she has her amazing story to tell, but I hope that others don't take her story as "advice" and take on their own trek in her style. This kind of journey needs to be taken with preparation. Had she been lost or injured, others would have had to go out and find her and/or rescue her due to her lack of preparation. In my neck of the woods, we hear stories all the time of ill-prepared campers and/or hikers who get lost and/or injured. I feel a preface on the book saying that you should always take precautions before taking such a journey would be prudent. 

Overall, this is an interesting story of her trek. I did enjoy most parts, though it was kind of all over the place with her memories woven within the hike of the trail...