The Third Gilmore Girl is one of the very few memoirs I have read — or, more accurately, listened to.
Kelly Bishop narrates the audiobook herself, apart from the foreword by Amy Sherman-Palladino, and perhaps because I know her voice so well as Emily Gilmore, there were moments when it almost felt as though Emily Gilmore were sitting there telling me her life story.
Except, of course, this is not Emily’s life. It is Kelly Bishop’s.
Gilmore Girls has long been one of my go-to cosy dramas, although strangely enough, I don’t particularly like the two main Gilmore girls. Lorelai can be far too over-the-top for me, while Rory’s romantic choices — particularly the way she moves from one relationship to another — made her increasingly difficult for me to like.
But I digress. This isn’t a review of Gilmore Girls. 😅
Despite my feelings about its two main characters, there are plenty of other characters I like, and Emily Gilmore has always been one of them.
She can certainly be a stick in the mud, but I always felt that much of that came from the way she had been raised and the very particular world she lived in. Old money, expectations, appearances and rules shaped her. She was disappointed in Lorelai, but she clearly loved Rory very much.
I sometimes found myself thinking that I would have liked to have had a grandmother who cared about me even half as much as Emily cared about Rory.
So when I came across Kelly Bishop’s memoir, I was intrigued.
I wanted to know about the woman behind Emily Gilmore. Where had she started? What had her life as a performer been like before Gilmore Girls? How did she eventually end up playing Emily, and what was it like to inhabit that character for so many years?
What I particularly enjoyed was how much of a glimpse the memoir gives into the world of professional performers.
Kelly Bishop’s career began long before Emily Gilmore. She moved to New York as a young woman to pursue dance, performed at Radio City and on Broadway, and eventually won a Tony Award for her role in A Chorus Line. Her career later moved through film and television before Gilmore Girls became such a major part of it.
Listening to her talk about those different stages of her life gave the book an almost old-school show-business feeling to me.
It also made me think about how often people who become very good at something seem to have known surprisingly early what they wanted to do. They choose a direction, keep working at it, hone their skills for years and gradually build a life around it.
Lucky.
There were also parts of Kelly Bishop’s political outlook that I didn’t necessarily agree with, particularly when she talked about some of her activism. But that never stopped me from liking her or enjoying the book.
And I did like her.
Kelly Bishop has a genuine flair for storytelling.
The audiobook never felt as though it dragged. She tells her own stories with enough personality that simply listening to her became part of the pleasure of the book. There is something particularly fitting about hearing a memoir like this in the author’s own voice rather than reading it silently on the page.
I originally picked up The Third Gilmore Girl because I wanted to know more about Emily Gilmore.
By the end, I was much more interested in Kelly Bishop.
★★★★★