Editing Lana Del Rey (section)

==Early Life and Background==

Born in New York City and raised primarily in Lake Placid in upstate New York, Grant grew up in a comfortable middle-class household. Her father, Rob Grant, was an entrepreneur who later became a successful copywriter; her mother, Patricia Hill, was a former model. She has described her upbringing as marked by a restless dissatisfaction and an early sensitivity to beauty, melancholy, and the passage of time — qualities that would become the emotional foundation of her artistic identity.

She attended Kent School, a boarding school in Connecticut, where she struggled with alcohol dependency as a teenager and was sent to live with an uncle and aunt in Arkansas for a period of sobriety and stabilization. She has spoken candidly about this chapter in interviews, framing it as foundational to her understanding of vulnerability and self-destruction — themes that run throughout her work. She subsequently studied philosophy and metaphysics at Fordham University in New York City, graduating in 2005, and the literary and philosophical breadth of her education is evident in the density and allusive quality of her songwriting.

After graduating she moved to the New Jersey trailer park communities around Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and the Lower East Side of Manhattan, working bar and waitressing jobs while developing her musical identity. She performed under several names — including '''Lizzy Grant''' and '''May Jailer''' — before settling on Lana Del Rey, a name she has described as evoking the glamour of old Hollywood and the geography of the American South and West.