Biography

Laurie Graham, Escape Artist

I was a demob baby, conceived when my Dad came home from WW2, and I grew up in Leicester, England’s geographical equivalent of North Platte, Nebraska. I’ve spent the rest of my life trying to get closer to the sea and in 2010 I finally made it, to lovely Dalkey on Dublin Bay. But life happens and now, after a long absence, I’m back in the UK, living in the wonderful Charterhouse in Smithfield, London and hoping I’ve made my last move. Well… last but one.

I was an asthmatic only child, cosseted and cherished, but for some ungrateful reason I began planning my escape almost as soon as I could walk. On my first breakout, aged 4, I got only as far as the Rawdykes Gas Works, headed off at the pass by a search party of weeping adults, but I was a repeat offender and I believe I may have been the only member of Third Year Infants who collected railway timetables.

Apart from being a wanderer I was famous as a heavy user of the lending library—I developed a six books a week habit at a very tender age—and also for my fibbing. Not fibs of the ‘a big boy broke it and ran away’ variety. Just gratuitous, transparent, but rather thrilling whoppers. As in, “Michael Quigley ate a worm from the compost heap and now he’s dead.” Enter stage left Michael Quigley, in bouncing good health.

Leicester is now famous for its curry houses. Back then it was still a shoe-making city and I came from a long line of people with job titles like ‘clicker’ and ‘closer’. No writers. Or so I thought. It’s only in very recent years I’ve discovered that my Great-Uncle Alfred was a Yorkshire stringer for some of the national dailies. Nor was writing on the career cards for me, though it should have been. Now I look back, it was the only thing for which I ever showed any aptitude. I was a duffer on the sports’ field, a no-hoper in the handicrafts’ class, and a lack-lustre home economist. While others scored goals and sewed beautiful seams I kept the school supplied with shows which I designed and directed and quite often made up mid-performance. I guess it was what we’d now call improv.

I had a spectacularly miserable time in university, trying to force myself into the square hole of science and quite unable to quit. In my family if you started something—a science degree, a second helping of pie  —you finished it. So when the opportunity of marriage and motherhood came along I leapt at it. In the space of five years I produced four wonderful children and surrendered happily to a life of sieved prunes in my hair and continuous loop readings of Chicken Licken.

In the early Eighties someone gave me a pre-war typewriter on which I developed upper body strength whilst writing my first attempt at a novel. The rest, as they say, is a history of rejection slips and filled wastepaper baskets. With the curtain about to fall on my first marriage and desperate for money I worked for a while behind the scenes at the Royal Courts of Justice, until I received the phone call that changed my life.

“Judgments and Executions,” I said. Answering the telephone with the name of my department was really the best part of the job.

“I’m Carmen Callil,” said the voice of cutting edge British publishing, ‘and I want to publish you.’

Nearly forty years ago already. It hardly seems possible. Since then I’ve gone through a series of minor transformations: debut novelist to rookie feature writer and columnist; out-of-work journalist back to hard-slog novelist. Wife and mother, divorcee, back to wife and now grandmother. I met Howard in the summer of ’96. A New Yorker transplanted to Europe and a fellow rover. We married in ’98 and spent our honeymoon planning the escape to top all escapes. In 1999 we moved to Venice—our idea of heaven on earth—and there we thought we’d stay for the rest of our days. Just as well we can’t know what’s waiting around that bend in the canal.

Ill health can arrive out of a clear, blue, Adriatic sky and it did. Venice is no place for the frail. Look what happened to poor old Dr. Aschenbach. And so, in 2010, we relocated yet again, to Dublin. A culture shock, but a pleasant one, to be bathed once again in my own language, and to be in a country whose staple crop is writers.

Now I’m alone again. My husband, his mind and personality devastated by dementia, died in 2020.  I feared my writing might suffer from the loss of his snarky Bronx critiques, not to mention his encyclopaedic knowledge of English grammar, but I plodded on anyway until my publishers said, ‘Thank you and goodbye.’ These days they’re desperate for the next hot thing and let’s face it, at 75 you’re not it.

But there was still the rent to pay so, handed lemons, I went into the lemonade-making business of self-publishing. No publisher wanted Dr Dan. It has gratified me more than I can say that my loyal readers vindicated my decision to publish him myself.

In 2022 I decided to experiment with retirement and I find it suits me. A bit of journalism, a bit of tour guiding and quite a lot of just watching the world go by. I may have lost my sea view but I’m only an hour’s train ride from Brighton. I’ll settle for that. Whether I have another novel in me, I’m not sure. I have plenty of ideas but not much steam. Maybe. Never say never.