For Lauren Graham, the best-selling author and actress known for her starring role in “Gilmore Girls,” community is the most important thing to hold onto after college.
“Continue to cultivate your friendships and your communities and your gratitude,” Graham said at Tuesday’s packed Senior Speaker event in Colton Chapel. “You’re just going to be finding yourself more and more and I don’t know, I think that’s really great.”
Graham dished out life advice, cracked jokes and spoke fondly about her time on “Gilmore Girls,” which still generates fan interactions despite the series finale airing almost 17 years ago.
“It’s the most beautiful, lovely people expressing such kindness and appreciation and it’s really wonderful,” she said.
In 2016, Graham revisited Stars Hollow with “Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life” on Netflix, which she described as “a feeling of home.”
“It’s as if you got to finish school, and then take some time away and be like, ‘What I really wish I’d done was X, Y and Z’ and then someone said, ‘Hey, you’re gonna get to go through school again and do it exactly how you want it and do it,” she said.
Graham also spoke about her time at a liberal arts college – she is a 1988 graduate of Barnard College – which she transferred to after a year of acting school where she did “all kinds of embodying an animal and movement.”
“You won’t believe this, but my ‘rolling around’ classes did not transfer,” Graham joked. “I was so like ‘I have to get out into the world and they’re waiting for me on the stage’ so I crammed four years of college at a really difficult school into three years, which was not necessary.”
Graham is currently in the middle of a tour promoting her latest memoir, “Have I Told You This Already?” An English major during her undergraduate career, Graham rediscovered her love of writing after her schedule freed up post-“Gilmore Girls.”
“I was sitting in the ‘Parenthood’ trailer one day and I was done with work at like three in the afternoon and it was a moment, both just practically where I was like, ‘What am I going to do the rest of the day?’ and almost spiritually, where I thought, ‘How did I get here?’”
Mary Armstrong, the event’s moderator and a professor of women’s, gender and sexuality studies and English, said that the talk went well.
“Being at Lafayette is serious business a lot of the time, as it should be; we’re a college, but this was just about having fun,” Armstrong said. “I sensed from looking out at the audience that people were having a really good time. They were excited to see her and loved what she had to say.”
As for the Team Dean, Jesse or Logan debate – Graham is sitting this one out.
“Someday I’ll tell you,” Graham said before dramatically mouthing “No I won’t.”
“There is no answer to any of those questions, although I do think Rory’s baby is Matthew Czuchry’s,” she continued. “Or it could be the Wookie.”
