Life’s Short, Talk Fast: 15 Writers on Why We Can’t Stop Watching ‘Gilmore Girls’

In this heartfelt tribute to Gilmore Girls, contributors reflect on what the show has meant to them. Tracey Minkin suggests that literature’s prominent role in teenage protagonist Rory Gilmore’s coming-of-age mirrors how books shaped her own adolescence, writing that “the bookish read as we breathe. It’s part of our autonomic nervous system. To not read is unimaginable.” In “Everything Softens,” Rand Richards Cooper recounts how his “roughneck” brother-in-law, “whose path through life had been crooked and full of missteps,” watched “this ultimate girls’ show” while undergoing treatment for the lung cancer that would eventually kill him, finding comfort in the portrayal of the fictional Connecticut town of Stars Hollow as a haven for misfits. Elsewhere, Sanjena Sathian compares her experience growing up as a South Asian woman in a predominantly white town with Korean character Lane Kim’s upbringing in Stars Hollow, and expresses ambivalence about how the term Asian American flattens the diversity found among Asian ethnicities and nationalities: “What I share with Lane isn’t Eastern roots—it’s the self-consciousness with which we must react, respond, and relate to America, as outsiders to this country.” The personal meditations are as soul-stirring as the show itself and shed light on its broad appeal. Gilmore Girls devotees will relish this. (Nov.)