Far from growing up in a small town like Stars Hollow, the picturesque (and fictional) small town in Connecticut where “Gilmore Girls” is set, Lauren Graham was raised all over the world thanks to her father, who worked for the U.S. Agency for International Development. As she told The Wall Street Journal, she was just 3 weeks old in 1967 when she moved to Tokyo, where her mother’s missionary parents lived.
Graham’s family didn’t return to the U.S. until 1972 when her parents divorced, and Graham lived with her dad. Her parents thought this would give her “more stability,” as her mom was in art school at the time, per The Wall Street Journal. While they were back in the States, Graham’s home was still uprooted time and time again. By the time she was 9, she had also lived in The Hamptons as well as an apartment in New York City, a summer home in upstate New York, and a houseboat in the Virgin Islands. Though she and her dad finally settled in Virginia, as a teenager, she also spent a lot of time in London where her mother sang in a band.
It wasn’t exactly a conventional childhood, but Graham enjoyed it, telling NPR that “it seemed like a great adventure.”