Laurie Graham Quotes

Laurie Graham

Profession : Journalist

Birth : November 25, 1947

My husband is stricken with dementia, and it's a trick of his condition that events and people from his past are more real to him than what happened five minutes ago.

Laurie Graham

I've never minded solitude. For a writer, it's a natural condition. But caring for a dementia sufferer leads to a peculiar kind of loneliness.

Laurie Graham

I have a magpie mind, by which I mean I see and hear little things - photos, fragments of conversation - and store them away for future use.

Laurie Graham

The word 'carer' makes me think of someone with a nylon overall and a long list of 'clients' to wash before she finishes her shift. A companion was something unique. A kind of live-in friend.

Laurie Graham

Personally, my interest in social history ends around 1959, by which time I was an adolescent. I've always attributed this to my particular sensibilities. I like formality and elegance, and I'm fundamentally conservative.

Laurie Graham

I have but one rule at my table. You may leave your cabbage, but you'll sit still and behave until I've eaten mine.

Laurie Graham

Times may have changed, but there are some things that are always with us - loneliness is one of them.

Laurie Graham

Dementia is quite unlike cancer or heart disease or any of those other conditions where you bargain with God for a cure or even just a bit more time.

Laurie Graham

Sundown is often the worst time of day for people with dementia. They can become restless and difficult.

Laurie Graham

I love working fictional characters into a piece of history. It plays to my strengths, which are characterization and dialogue, and assists me in my admitted weakness, plot.

Laurie Graham

I'm thankful my parents obliged me to live with the unvarnished truth: I might not have been a looker, but I was a better speller than the prettiest girl in my class, and I was funnier, too.

Laurie Graham

The terror dementia sufferers must feel is unimaginable, but the techniques they use to hide their difficulties - the ducking and diving and keeping the world laughing - are perfectly understandable.

Laurie Graham

I almost always use first person voice in my novels. It has its limitations, but it gives a sense of immediacy that's hard to create with an anonymous, all-seeing narrator.

Laurie Graham

Characters develop as the book progresses, but any that start to bore me end up in the wastepaper basket. In real life, we may have to put up with tedious people, but not in novels.

Laurie Graham

As well as writing novels and doing short-order journalism, I am also the full-time carer of my husband, who has Alzheimer's. Each day feels like a race that must be run.

Laurie Graham

The wheels of publishing never slow down.

Laurie Graham

Not so very long ago, certainly well into the Thirties, a lady companion was a normal feature of life for widows or lone spinsters.

Laurie Graham

My research process doesn't vary much. I do a little reading to establish a timeline and decide how I'm going to approach the story.

Laurie Graham

My preferred style is to write in first person, so I always have to play around with possible narrator voices until I find something that works.

Laurie Graham

My early novels were very understated and English. Fourteen years ago, I met and married my American husband, and as I learned more about his background and culture, I became interested in using American voices.

Laurie Graham