#Sue grafton series

The rage Grafton felt towards her mother for the years of neglect was overwhelming and is unmediated in her writing. 'She'd already attempted suicide twice and was upset she'd survived the operation. Her mother, meanwhile, was in hospital recovering from an operation to remove cancer in her oesophagus brought on by 15 years of drinking and smoking.

I wanted to get out of that house.'īy the time she was 20, Grafton had got her wish by getting married and having a baby. Not surprisingly, I grew up confused, rebellious, fearful, independent, imaginative, curious, free-spirited and anxious. When life seemed unbearable, my father, to comfort me, would sit on the edge of my bed and recount in patient detail the occasion when the family doctor had told him he'd have to choose between and us, and he'd chosen her because she was weak and needed him and we were strong and could survive. 'Discipline, when it came, was arbitrary and capricious. From the age of five onward, I was left to raise myself, which I did as well as I could, having had no formal training in parenthood. My mother, similarly fortified, went to sleep on the couch. 'Every morning,' she writes, 'my father downed two jiggers of whiskey and went to the office. Both were alcoholics: CW a functioning one, Vivian manifestly not. Her father, CW Grafton, was a lawyer and occasional writer of detective fiction her mother seldom left the house. Grafton was born in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1940. Sue Grafton, age three, and her six-year-old sister, with their mother and father. It amuses her, I'm sure, that she will live in this world long after I'm gone.' It amused me that I invented someone who has gone on to support me. Often I feel she's peering over my shoulder, whispering, nudging me and making bawdy remarks. I think of us as one soul in two bodies and she got the good one. While our biographies are different, our sensibilities are the same. The process of writing informs both her life and mine. 'Like Kinsey,' she writes, 'I've been married and divorced twice (though I'm currently married to husband number three and intend to remain so for life). In her latest book, Kinsey and Me, Grafton has gone even further to spell out how blurred the distinctions sometimes are by making clear that Kinsey's existence allows her to lead two lives – 'hers and mine'. Rather she has often muddied the waters as much as possible, by saying: 'Kinsey is my alter ego – the person I might have been had I not married young and had children.'

#Sue grafton series

Sue Grafton, author of the best-selling alphabetical detective series that began with A is for Alibi in 1982 and is now up to V is for Vengeance, has seldom made any effort to separate herself from her fictional creation, PI Kinsey Millhone. M ost novelists prefer to maintain a distance between themselves and their characters it preserves a veneer of sanity.