Kinsey and Me Stories by Sue Grafton

I truly was not going to blog about Kinsey and Me Stories, figuring that the stories in the book were typical Sue Grafton/Kinsey Millhone stories. And for the first two thirds of the book this is true. In Part 1: Kinsey, in true Grafton/Millhone style, Ms. Grafton has crafted interesting, fun short stories featuring Kinsey. In an introduction to this section, she talks about how difficult short stories are to write and I whole-heartedly agree. If this was all the book was, I would have put a brief note in Librarything and moved on.

However….that is not the sum total of this book. The stories in Part 2:…And Me were written in the 10 years following Grafton’s mother’s death and these are riveting, revealing, honest, emotional and unlike anything Grafton that I’ve read. The stories talk about feelings of a young daughter towards her alcoholic parents, the emotional toll when a mother is stricken with esophogial cancer and what it’s like when the child becomes a parent to a parent. I only reluctantly put these stories down and went back to work.

As you know, I’ve been reading a lot of pulp fiction mystery stories from the 1920s through the 1950s. These stories are typically gritty and descriptive, with the occasional comic story thrown in. However, that’s not the Kinsey Millhone style. The Millhone stories here are short extensions of the detective series books, so they are easy going, enjoyable and comfortable.

So, if you’re not a mystery fan, skip Part 1 (that would be silly) and go directly to Part 2. In it are life lessons about understanding and appreciating later in life those things we don’t quite grasp or appreciate in our youth. In the final story is a letter from a father to a daughter in which he reminisces about her as a girl and the daughter’s reaction to these events thirty years later. In it, she said “You want to tell him you treasure all the relics of the past. You know now that you are a living museum, full of rooms and crooked corridors that repeat themselves at every turn.” And so we are a sum of the events of the past and for many of us, it takes us a long time to appreciate that past, as well as the present.

Get to know a deeper Sue Granfton by reading Kinsey and Me Stories.

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