I watched the Gilmore Girls

And I'm on team Emily. Happy Mother's Day.

Before we begin…

Is there a mother in literature, shows, or movies that you love to hate, or just plain love? What story have you come across that does the best job of showing the complex mother-daughter relationship?

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I am no longer a GG virgin

A couple of months ago, I finished watching every episode of Gilmore Girls ever made including the controversial seventh season and the tender follow-up A Year in The Life (or AYITL to the fans out there.) I am no longer a GG virgin – after years of ignorance followed by resistance, I gave in to my curiosity and a desire to escape. Now I’m ruined.

The show worms its way through my brain at the oddest moments – like an ear worm that just won’t quit. I have reviewed each episode at length with my husband over coffee. I joined a fan page on Facebook – for research — but then I found lots of really smart and thoughtful women with a lot of good things to say. Now, I am going to torment you, dear readers, with a few words about this show on this Mother’s Day weekend. Because if GG is about anything, it is about the tangled web that binds mothers and daughters, especially single moms. It’s also about class, books, education, and being a girl, being a woman, pop culture, romance, only children, and a lot of other stuff that we won’t get to today. It is a show that I both love and hate, appreciate and resent in ways that are totally out of line with what I intended it to be: an escape.

[I apologize in advance to those who know and care about the show and are looking for an eye-opening perspective and to those who never watched the show, never will, and care nothing about Team Dean, Jess, or Logan.]

In a nutshell: the story follows Lorelei and Rory, a mother-daughter duo forged when Lorelei became pregnant at sixteen and, a year later, departed the very large home of her very rich and very snooty parents, and headed out, infant in arms, to forge her way in the world. The “world” turns out to be a fictional Connecticut village twenty miles from her parents’ home called Stars Hollow. Here, Lorelei is taken in by an inn owner who gives her a roof over her head, a job, and, presumably, babysitting or daycare services - the practicalities are never spelled out. The show opens in 2000 when Lorelei is 32 and now the inn manager. Rory is 16, and a bright student and a voracious reader. Both are focused on getting Rory into Harvard by way of a private school in nearby Hartford. This leads them back to the big cold house of the very rich parents. From this point, we sit back and watch the family dynamics unfold while Rory grows up, Lorelei falls in and out of love, and the two fall back time and again on their “us against the world” relationship. Lorelei calls her daughter her “best friend.”

“Best friends”

That notion of “best friend” kept me awake at night in the beginning. I don’t know if I was jealous or suspicious. Maybe both. I was once the single mother whose then twenty-something son told her he was glad I’d never tried to be his friend. He went on to describe how his contemporaries were raising their toddlers as if they were equals. He disapproved. I felt vindicated, a feeling that was challenged when I saw how much fun Lorelei was having with her daughter. 

Was it different for mothers and daughters or only for single mothers of single daughters whose dialog and relationship created by the husband-wife team of Amy Sherman Palladino and her husband Dan Palladino, the force behind Mrs. Maisel? Stars Hollow is set up as a fantasy village where everyone is known to each other and have adopted Lorelei and Rory. The two are unofficial queen and princess. The town is a character in its own right with a bossy selectman, a handsome diner owner, a general factotum who shows up in each episode with yet another job. There is even a town minstrel. Stars Hollow is a town where an innkeeper can afford her own Victorian house, a waitress can pay rent and feed herself while dreaming of being a musician, and women order great quantities of greasy, salty, sugary food that we are meant to believe they consume even if we never see it with our own eyes. Coffee replaces water as the vital fluid and yet there is never once an episode of acid-stomach or, apparently, coffee-breath. 

“Stars Hollow” in Autumn (in case it wasn’t obvious)

As I watched the first season, I felt distant from and often irritated by the witty, quippy, frosted cake of a world and was grateful when we occasionally crunched down on a brittle fragment of reality. But then I kept watching. I couldn’t NOT watch. Even when I rolled my eyes at the over-the-top bantering, the Broadway-musical treatment of some episodes, or the irritating character of Taylor the lone town selectman, I needed to see if Rory would develop into someone I cared about or Lorelei would ever realize how much like her mother she was or if Rory’s best friend, Lane, would ever realize her dream of being a drummer in a rock band. But, mostly, I kept watching because of Lorelei’s mother, Emily Gilmore. 

Mom-ster?

Emily Gilmore (played by Kelley Bishop)

Emily is one of the most richly-drawn characters and one I rooted far even more often than I did for either her daughter or granddaughter. Never for one minute, does Emily view her daughter as a “best friend.” She is MOTHER. When we meet her, we see a monster of cold, WASP-y propriety whose pride and upbringing keep her from the kind of frank, warm, declaration of love that comes so easily between Lorelei and her own daughter. Over time, she reveals herself to be lonely, loyal, and loving in her own way. She is mystified by Lorelei’s choices and, at times, jealous of her daughter’s independence and achievements. She is unapologetic about who she is but at the same time, honest enough to recognize and even admire what her daughter has been able to do. More tragically, she goes for a long time believing that the only way to keep Lorelei and Rory close to her is by buying their presence. Money becomes the umbilical cord that keeps them connected because both Emily and Lorelei love Rory who wants to go to expensive schools and do expensive things. 

It was wonderfully frustrating to watch Emily open up just a little in one episode with frank admiration for Lorelei and then, a few scenes later, retreat and re-arm.

Emily is a product of her time and upbringing. She is defined by her marriage and her family and her money. Her character has some ugly sides but then, so does her daughter’s. Both have plenty of growing to do and some of the best happens when they need each other. 

The two women are bonded in a way that does not look like love but borders it. When Lorelei wants to send Rory to private school, she goes to Emily. When Emily is picked up for driving under the influence, she calls Lorelei. When Richard - husband of Emily and father of Lorelei - has a heart attack, Lorelei helps her mother with Quickbooks. When Lorelei and Emily come into contact with each other, they rub each other the wrong way. The friction wears off the veneer hiding each of them, and shows the vulnerable and much more admirable human beneath. They each cling to past hurts for too long because neither one knows what might lie on the other side.

This feels authentic to me. There is often no happily-ever-after story for mothers and daughters who have struggled. There can, however, be growth and a degree of acceptance that is rooted in each one’s ability to claim her own life. Thrillingly, we get a glimpse of what this might look like for Emily and even for Lorelei in AYITL. After years of focus on the young women struggling to come of age in GG, we get to see what coming of age looks like for a mother in her sixties. It was worth all the hours I spent watching just to see it.

Single-mother/only-daughter stories with little more reality

Take away Emily’s money and the gloss of a created-for-television fantasy, and Gilmore Girls would be a grittier story. Here are three books that consider single mothers of only daughters in a world that is more rooted in reality. Because if there is one thing that single moms get faced with an awful lot of the time, it’s reality. 

• The finances of raising a kid when you’re sixteen and working as a chambermaid are a lot harder than they look on GG. See Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother’s Will to Survive by

  Stephanie Land
                    .

• A daughter must grapple with identity and her bond with the narcissistic mother who is imprisoned for murder, leaving the daughter adrift in the foster system  – White Oleander by

  Janet Fitch
  anyone? 

• A widow and her daughter with limited means in a small New England mill town yearn for status and freedom respectively. They are not adopted but kept to the sides of things, left out or unseen by those with families or positions of respectability – Amy and Isabelle by Elizabeth Strout

More reads inspired by the Gilmore Girls

Or, if you are looking for books that are more in the vein of the show itself, here are three lists assembled by other bookish folks and lovers of the show.

• Romances about single mothers

• Mothers and Daughters

• If you love Gilmore Girls…

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Lines that linger: let’s play 

Let’s play. Share a sentence from anything you’ve read this week along with the source. No need to add any context, the fun part is getting to see how it impacts others. Here’s mine:

“It brought to him a disorienting strangeness, because his mind had not changed at the same pace as his life, and he felt a hollow space between himself and the person he was supposed to be.” – From Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Now add yours:

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Gratefully yours,

Betsy

P.S. And now, your moment of Zen…yes, that is a dog on my head

Calling for Your Contribution to “Moment of Zen”: 

What is YOUR moment of Zen? Send me your photos, a video, a drawing, a song, a poem, or anything with a visual that moved you, thrilled you, calmed you. Or just cracked you up. This feature is wide open for your own personal interpretation.

Come on, go through your photos, your memories or just keep your eyes and ears to the ground and then share. Send your photos/links, etc. to me by replying to this email or simply by sending to: elizabethmarro@substack.com. The main guidelines are probably already obvious: don’t hurt anyone  -- don’t send anything that violates the privacy of someone you love or even someone you hate, don’t send anything divisive, or aimed at disparaging others. Our Zen moments are to help us connect, to bond, to learn, to wonder, to share -- to escape the world for a little bit and return refreshed. 

I can’t wait to see what you send!

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