Quick Pick book review - Talking As Fast as I Can: From Gilmore Girls to Gilmore Girls (And Everything in Between), by Lauren Graham

• Opening lines: If you'd asked me back at the beginning of my career to guess which character I was most likely to return to, fifteen years after I'd played her for the first time, there would have been only one answer. Even back then I knew, from the very first time I read the script, that I had been given the opportunity to play someone very special. 
• Reason I picked up the book: I'm a huge Gilmore Girls fan (although I binged the series on Netflix starting last year, and had not watched it while it aired). 
• And what's this book about? 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 book 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.
• Favorite paragraph: I wondered what it would be like to put someone I loved so much down for eight years and then pick her up again. I wondered if rebooting Gilmore Girls could be as gratifying as doing the series was for the first time, if the show would feel as fresh and quirky and smart and speedy as it had been, if returning to Stars Hollow after all those years would be as wonderful as I dreamed it would be.
  
  Spoiler alert: it was.
• Recommended for: Anyone who is a fan of Lauren Graham's work (specifically, of course, Gilmore Girls, but there are some Parenthood nuggets thrown in here too) or wants to know more about her.
• Something to know: I didn't know that Graham had a theater "internship" of sorts in Augusta, MI, for two summers (which is by Kalamazoo - I looked it up), which was interesting. There is also a lot of behind-the-scenes info on Gilmore Girls here which I liked. The book reads like Lorelai Gilmore is narrating it too (it's written very well in Graham's own voice, which is similar), which I loved. 
• What I would have changed: Nothing I can think of.
• Overall rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars.
• Where can I find this book? Click here to order on Amazon.