The novelist talks about growing up with alcoholic parents, and how it shaped her writing and led to her fictional alter ego, Kinsey Millhone. And, below, we publish an extract from her latest book, Kinsey and Me
Sue Grafton: 'It took me a long while to
allow myself to feel anything positive towards my mother.'
Most novelists prefer to
maintain a distance between themselves and their characters; it preserves a
veneer of sanity. If not always one of mystery. 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. 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."
- Kinsey and Me: Stories
- by Sue Grafton
- 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". "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). The process of writing informs both her life and mine. While our biographies are different, our sensibilities are the same ... I think of us as one soul in two bodies and she got the good one ... Often I feel she's peering over my shoulder, whispering, nudging me and making bawdy remarks ... It amused me that I invented someone who has gone on to support me. It amuses her, I'm sure, that she will live in this world long after I'm gone."
Kinsey Millhone, then, is
Grafton by another name. Grafton in a parallel universe. Just why Grafton might,
more than most of us, have felt the need to create another version of her life
is spelled out in a series of autobiographical short stories written during the
10 years after her mother died in 1960. What is remarkable about these stories
is not just their brutal honesty, but that they are also written variously in
the first, second and third person with all the family members' names
changed – Grafton becomes Kit, her mother Vivian becomes Vanessa, and her sister
Ann is Del. "I had no intention of being deliberately tricksy," she says. "I
just wrote them as I experienced them. Looking back, I can only guess that some
parts were so painful that I couldn't stop distancing myself from them. It's no
coincidence that Kinsey was orphaned at five years old, when her parents were
killed in a car crash: I also felt that my childhood ended when I was five."
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