What to Read Next, Based on Your Favorite Gilmore Girls Character
Where you lead, I will follow...
It will come as no surprise to you that I, a millennial white woman, love Gilmore Girls.
I owe an embarrassingly large part of my personality, tastes, interests, and mannerisms to the years and years I spent watching Gilmore Girls on repeat on ABC Family at 5pm on the dot every single weekday.
(I’m not kidding, my mom and I sat down and watched Gilmore Girls every single day from the time I was in fourth grade til I left for college. Every day, nearly without fail. I specifically remember getting into a huge fight with her about something when I was 13 or 14 and I stormed off to my room. Not too long later I heard the dulcet tones of Carole King playing from downstairs, and sheepishly crept downstairs to watch it with her. Neither of us ever acknowledged it.)
So, anyways, yes I know it’s hardly unique to be a millennial 30-something woman who loves Gilmore Girls, but it has truly been a part of my life for… most of my life, at this point. And with a show as intertwined with books as this one, it was only a matter of time til I wrote this post (expect more iterations in the future – there are a lot of characters that I have a lot of opinions about).
Lorelai Gilmore
Lorelai was my first blueprint, patron saint, and idol – rebellious, witty, determined, and charming. I know a lot of people think she’s annoying and selfish and makes bad choices, and sure, there are plenty of moments like that, but to those people I’d say – it’s called being a complex female character, you should try it sometime.
Anyways, for Lorelai’s recs, I chose stories that featured complex mother-daughter relationships, and teen mothers triumphing over judgmental and patriarchal systems designed to keep them down.
Sleep by Honor Jones
Ten-year-old Margaret hides beneath a blackberry bush in her family’s verdant backyard while her brother hunts for her in a game of flashlight tag. Hers is a childhood of sunlit swimming pools and Saturday morning pancakes and a devoted best friend, but her family life requires careful maintenance. Her mother can be as brittle and exacting as she is loving, and her father and brother assume familiar, if uncomfortable, models of masculinity. Then late one summer, everything changes. After a series of confusing transgressions, the simple pleasures of girlhood, slip away.
Twenty-five years later, Margaret hides under her parents’ bed, waiting for her young daughters to find her in a game of hide and seek. She’s newly divorced and navigating her life as a co-parent, while discovering the pleasures of a new lover. But some part of her is still under the blackberry bush, punched out of time. Called upon to be a mother to her daughters, and a daughter to her mother, she must reckon with the echoes and refractions between the past and the present, what it means to keep a child safe, and how much of our lives are our own, alone.
Where the Girls Were by Kate Schatz
It’s 1968, and the future is bright for seventeen-year-old Elizabeth “Baker.” She’s the valedictorian of her high school, with a place at Stanford in the fall and big dreams of becoming a journalist. But the seductive free-spirited San Francisco atmosphere seeps into her carefully-planned, strait-laced life in the form of a hippie named Wiley. At first, letting loose and letting herself fall in love for the first time feels incredible. But then, everything changes.
Pregnancy hits Baker with the force of whiplash—in the blink of an eye, she goes from good girl to fallen woman, from her family’s shining star to their embarrassing secret. Sent to a home for unwed mothers, Baker finds herself trapped in an old Victorian house packed with a group of pregnant girls who share her shame and fear. As she reckons with her changing body, lack of choice, and uncertain future, Baker finds unexpected community and empowerment among the “girls who went away.”
The White Hot by Quiara Alegría Hudes
April is a young mother raising her daughter in an intergenerational house of unspoken secrets and loud arguments. Her only refuge is to hide away in a locked bathroom, her ears plugged into an ambient soundscape, and a mantra on her lips: dead inside. That is, until one day, as she finds herself spiraling toward the volcanic rage she calls the white hot, a voice inside her tells her to just . . . walk away. She wanders to a bus station and asks for a ticket to the furthest destination; she tells the clerk to make it one-way. That ticket takes her from her Philly home to the threshold of a wilderness and the beginning of a nameless quest—an accidental journey that shakes her awake, almost kills her, and brings her to the brink of an impossible choice.
Rory Gilmore
I have a lot of complex feelings about Rory. As a child, I idolized her. As an adult, I partially cringe at her repeated terrible decisions and partially see myself in her “former gifted child” crises in the revival.
Largely, however, I do feel like she is a selfish, spoiled girl who squandered a lot of her opportunities because she knew she could fall back on her grandparents’ money. She made a lot of dumb decisions, especially involving the men in her life, and I had hoped that she would have grown past that in the revival but no such luck. (Actually, my biggest gripe about the revival is that it all would have made sense as season 7 of the original series when Rory was in her early twenties, but since it came out like 15 years later, she just comes off looking pathetic still doing this shit in her 30s. Amy Sherman Palladino was clearly bitter that she got ousted from writing the final season the way she wanted to, so she used the revival to shoehorn in her story to the detriment of the writing and characters.)
ANYWAYS. When picking books for Rory, I looked for ones that involved questionable relationship choices, like continuing to go back to a relationship that isn’t serving you, and the feeling of once being promising but fading into normality. (aka, Sally Rooney novels).
So Good to See You by Francesca Hornak
2004. Serge, Rosie and Daniel are enjoying their final weeks of university. They are young, inseparable and full of optimism.
Fifteen years later, they are guests at a lavish three-day wedding in Provence - and no longer friends. Life has not turned out quite as planned since their heady days at Oxford. Film-maker Serge is winning awards, but hiding a huge debt and fractured relationship. Behind Rosie’s social ease, she is heartbroken. And with Daniel’s fame has come spiralling anxiety.
Now, with four days of organised fun ahead, all three are armed with their best conversation and brightest smile. At least everyone is following the same do not bring up the past. But as the champagne flows, appearances slip and true feelings emerge.
Heart the Lover by Lily King
Our narrator understands good love stories—their secrets and subtext, their highs and their free falls. But her greatest love story, the one she lived, never followed the simple rules.
In the fall of her senior year of college, she meets two star students from her 17th-Century Lit class: Sam and Yash. Best friends living off-campus in the elegant house of a professor on sabbatical, the boys invite her into their intoxicating world of academic fervor, rapid-fire banter and raucous card games. They nickname her Jordan, and she quickly discovers the pleasures of friendship, love and her own intellectual ambition. Youthful passion is unpredictable though, and she soon finds herself at the center of a charged and intricate triangle. As graduation comes and goes, choices made will alter these three lives forever.
Decades later, Jordan is living the life she dreamed of, and the vulnerable days of her youth seem comfortably behind her. But when a surprise visit and unexpected news brings the past crashing into the present, Jordan returns to a world she left behind and is forced to confront the decisions and deceptions of her younger self.
Normal People by Sally Rooney
At school Connell and Marianne pretend not to know each other. He’s popular and well-adjusted, star of the school soccer team while she is lonely, proud, and intensely private. But when Connell comes to pick his mother up from her housekeeping job at Marianne’s house, a strange and indelible connection grows between the two teenagers - one they are determined to conceal.
A year later, they’re both studying at Trinity College in Dublin. Marianne has found her feet in a new social world while Connell hangs at the sidelines, shy and uncertain. Throughout their years in college, Marianne and Connell circle one another, straying toward other people and possibilities but always magnetically, irresistibly drawn back together. Then, as she veers into self-destruction and he begins to search for meaning elsewhere, each must confront how far they are willing to go to save the other.
Emily Gilmore
I truly think Emily’s arc is one of the most interesting in the entire series. I don’t have a lot of love for the Year in the Life revival, except for Emily’s progression. This is a woman who has played by the rules that her narrow society had laid down for her since birth. She was the perfect daughter, the perfect wife, and desperately tried to be the perfect mother, but unfortunately gave birth to a daughter that had a mind of her own.
She played the part of society wife for decades, and genuinely loved Richard, but the freedom she finds after his death is so cathartic. Plus, her proclaiming “this is all bullshit” at a DAR meeting lives in my head rent-free.
For Emily’s book recs, I looked for stories that featured that feeling of breaking free from the mold that high society has crammed you into.
The Mad Wife by Meagan Church
Lulu Mayfield has spent the last five years molding herself into the perfect 1950s housewife. Despite the tragic memories that haunt her and the weight of exhausting expectations, she keeps her husband happy, her household running, and her gelatin salads the talk of the neighborhood. But after she gives birth to her second child, Lulu’s carefully crafted life begins to unravel.
When a new neighbor, Bitsy, moves in, Lulu suspects that something darker lurks behind the woman’s constant smile. As her fixation on Bitsy deepens, Lulu is drawn into a web of unsettling truths that threaten to expose the cracks in her own life. The more she uncovers about Bitsy, the more she questions everything she thought she knew―and soon, others begin questioning her sanity. But is Lulu truly losing her mind? Or is she on the verge of discovering a reality too terrifying to accept?
Happiness and Love by Zoe Dubno
Years after escaping New York and the center of its artistic world—a group of self-important, depraved, and unscrupulous artists, curators, and hangers-on—our narrator is back in town. With no plans to see anyone she once knew, she’s wandering around the Lower East Side, thinking about the recent death of her former best friend, Rebecca, when she runs into Eugene, one half of the artist-curator couple at the heart of her old social set. Despite her better judgement, she accepts his invitation to a dinner party. And though the party is held only hours after Rebecca’s funeral, it not a memorial of Rebecca but a dinner held in honor of a young, newly famous actress whose lateness delays the party by hours.
As the guests sip their natural wine and await the actress’s arrival, the narrator, from her perch on the corner seat of a white sofa, silently, systematically, and mercilessly eviscerates them—their manners, their relationships, their delusions and failures, and the complete moral poverty that brings them here, to Nicole and Eugene’s loft on the Bowery. When the guest of honor finally does arrive, she sets in motion a disastrous end to the evening, laying bare the depravity and decadence of the hosts’ empty little lives—a hollowness that the narrator herself knows all too well.
Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder
At home full-time with her two-year-old son, an artist finds she is struggling. She is lonely and exhausted. She had imagined - what was it she had imagined? Her husband, always travelling for his work, calls her from faraway hotel rooms. One more toddler bedtime, and she fears she might lose her mind.
Instead, quite suddenly, she starts gaining things, surprising things that happen one night when her child will not sleep. Sharper canines. Strange new patches of hair. New appetites, new instincts. And from deep within herself, a new voice...
Paris Gellar
Paris is filled with rage at all times and frankly I admire that about her. She knows exactly what she wants and she is not afraid to go after it. Even when that thing is her much, much older professor.
For Paris’ book recs, I found several about the fallout of dating a mentor figure, plus the feeling of crashing out over your perceived failures, even if they were 100% self-inflicted.
The Mind Reels by Fredrik deBoer
In a dorm room at her safety school, surrounded by cornfed boys and contemptuous girls, Alice is losing her mind. Her first semester is spent clinging to middling grades between drunken hookups and roommate fights. The next brings sleepless nights, extreme weight loss, and effortless, compulsive energy, paused only by an unexpected summoning from the RA for evaluation. Thus begins an endless march of lithium, antidepressants, and Klonopin; doctors and therapists—when health insurance allows—along with overwhelmed parents and well-intentioned friends; all helpless bystanders as Alice descends deeper into chaos.
Bitter Sweet by Hattie Williams
Charlie hasn’t always had high hopes for herself. But now at twenty-three, she’s landed her dream job as an assistant at a historic London publishing house, moved into a stunning townhome with two of the most glamorous, kind and generous people she’s ever met, and her favorite author, the award-winning, generation-defining, charming Richard Aveling, is about to publish his magnum opus—and Charlie is going to be working with him.
She couldn’t be more excited to help publish the man whose writing has inspired her since she was a teenager. When Charlie bumps into Richard while having a smoke in the rain, the attraction is immediate, and the moment feels nothing short of cinematic.
So when the Richard Aveling begins to take her advice over that of more senior staff, Charlie finds herself drawn to him despite their thirty-year age gap, his marriage, and the disparity in their power at the publishing house. Once Richard makes it clear that he’s drawn to her as well, they begin an affair that Charlie never saw coming; it is a relationship founded in control and silence.
Too soon, she can’t imagine her life without Richard, and too late, she understands that losing him will unravel more than just their relationship…it might also unravel her.
Cleopatra and Frankenstein by Coco Mellors
Twenty-four-year-old British painter Cleo has escaped from England to New York and is still finding her place in the sleepless city when, a few months before her student visa ends, she meets Frank. Twenty years older and a self-made success, Frank’s life is full of all the excesses Cleo’s lacks. He offers her the chance to be happy, the freedom to paint, and the opportunity to apply for a Green Card. But their impulsive marriage irreversibly changes both their lives, and the lives of those close to them, in ways they never could’ve predicted.
Each compulsively readable chapter explores the lives of Cleo, Frank, and an unforgettable cast of their closest friends and family as they grow up and grow older. Whether it’s Cleo’s best friend struggling to embrace his gender queerness in the wake of Cleo’s marriage, or Frank’s financially dependent sister arranging sugar daddy dates to support herself after being cut off, or Cleo and Frank themselves as they discover the trials of marriage and mental illness, each character is as absorbing, and painfully relatable, as the last.
Lane Kim
Oh Lane, world’s coolest bff, you deserved so much better than you got. I really, really hate how Lane’s story ended. I don’t mind her marrying Zach, doofus though he may be, but I cannot stand that they just immediately saddled her with twins and doomed her to a life of domesticity. She should have been a rockstar!!!! I’ve got a lot of beef with Amy Sherman Palladino, clearly.
Lane’s book recs consist of stories about iconic bands, as she would have wanted, plus a memoir by a rockstar about reconnecting with her Korean heritage – truly Lane Kim-coded if we were allowed to have nice things.
Daisy Jones and the Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid
Daisy is a girl coming of age in L.A. in the late sixties, sneaking into clubs on the Sunset Strip, sleeping with rock stars, and dreaming of singing at the Whisky a Go Go. The sex and drugs are thrilling, but it’s the rock ’n’ roll she loves most. By the time she’s twenty, her voice is getting noticed, and she has the kind of heedless beauty that makes people do crazy things.
Also getting noticed is The Six, a band led by the brooding Billy Dunne. On the eve of their first tour, his girlfriend Camila finds out she’s pregnant, and with the pressure of impending fatherhood and fame, Billy goes a little wild on the road.
Daisy and Billy cross paths when a producer realizes that the key to supercharged success is to put the two together. What happens next will become the stuff of legend.
Mayluna by Kelley McNeil
In the 1990s, Carter Wills was the lead singer of the English alt-rock band Mayluna, securing his place among music legends. His tortured-heart lyrics struck a chord. And so did his secret connection to a woman whose love changed all their lives. Who was she?
Evie Waters’s two grown children discover an iconic photo in an old magazine of a “mystery girl” with their mother. It all started in a wistful time and place for Evie, her twenty-fifth summer. A young columnist forging her career. Backstage euphoria. A long-shot interview. And an almost cosmic connection with an enigmatic musician on the rise.
What happened between them is a hidden story no one, not even Evie’s family, knows. Until now. Worlds apart, Carter and Evie finally reveal the story—joyful, regretful, and unforgettable. It was a time when the stars aligned for a love so profound the whole world felt it. It was as if it would last forever.
Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner
In this exquisite story of family, food, grief, and endurance, Michelle Zauner proves herself far more than a dazzling singer, songwriter, and guitarist. With humour and heart, she tells of growing up the only Asian-American kid at her school in Eugene, Oregon; of struggling with her mother’s particular, high expectations of her; of a painful adolescence; of treasured months spent in her grandmother’s tiny apartment in Seoul, where she and her mother would bond, late at night, over heaping plates of food. As she grew up, moving to the east coast for college, finding work in the restaurant industry, performing gigs with her fledgling band – and meeting the man who would become her husband – her Koreanness began to feel ever more distant, even as she found the life she wanted to live.
It was her mother’s diagnosis of terminal pancreatic cancer, when Michelle was twenty-five, that forced a reckoning with her identity and brought her to reclaim the gifts of taste, language, and history her mother had given her.
Added ALL new titles to my TBR. Also, I loooove your reflection on Gilmore Girls as an adult. I share so many of these sentiments, especially how the show hits differently once you’ve lived a little more 🤍
Heart the Lover was exceptional!