Spoiler Alert.
As expected, Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life did not disappoint. The original writers were back, and they were so good we could almost forget the seventh season ever happened. Stars Hollow is quaint and quirky as always, Lorelai and Rory speak as quickly as usual, and Luke has his same backwards cap and plaid shirt. But what made it so good was just how real it was.
The story line picks up about a decade after Rory graduates from Yale, lands a job, and rejects Logan’s marriage proposal. It is expected that she will go out into the world and do great things. Rory has always been the ‘good girl,’ the mature one, the academic, the grounded one, and the barrier between her mother and her grandparents. Because of her sweet temperament, and her innocent, likable qualities, we, as well as the characters around her, held certain expectations about the kind of successful future that lay ahead for her. Instead, we were greeted with the reality of tough, imperfect world and implications of changing times.
We find Rory in a rough patch, trying to find a career path, dating a guy in Stars Hollow, having an affair with Logan in London and with no permanent place to call home. The perfect future we all imagined for her was nowhere in sight. At first, this angered me. But as I continued through the series, I realized it made sense. Rory never really had the space to make mistakes and be immature. There was only the brief stint where she lived with her grandparents after the boating accident with Logan that was really an example of her acting out. She had a string of steady boyfriends without much room in between to explore her sexuality. But now she's in the adult world, and as we know, growing up is hard to do.
Now we see her trying to figure out her next life steps in a way that is so much closer to reality. For perhaps the first time in her life, she is experiencing true failure. And she is experiencing it while having to face the people who it will disappoint most of all. Rory questions if she should get her masters, or continue to search for a career that uses her degree. She has options floating around her, but none seem to be the right fit. This hits home for young professionals most of all.
Particular to Rory’s career choice, there is an emphasis on the difficulties of pursuing a writing career. We often romanticize what it means to be a writer. We picture the lone novelist at a desk in some rustic cabin, or the persistent journalist traveling the world and speaking to strangers to get the story. In truth, these are thankless, low paying positions that even still, are hard to come by. We do not value these positions nearly enough, and these are the people who reflect life experiences back on us, teach us about human nature and connect us with people across the world.
Rory’s situation also makes us re-evaluate the role of a woman in her thirties. Not even a few decades ago, it was expected that a woman in her thirties would be married, settled down, most likely with children. Now, to be thirty isn’t even old. This becomes especially apparent when Rory’s secret pregnancy is revealed at the end. We are left to think about what it means for her to be having a child out of wedlock, and raising it by herself much like her mother did. But these things are no longer as unconventional as they once were. On the one hand, there is disappointment in this accidental pregnancy and the way she is following in her mother’s footsteps. On the other hand, it is a rather prophetic move which brings her full circle from her own upbringing by a single mom.
There is a lot left to question about what happened in the decade since we left the Gilmores which brought Rory to the point she is at now. What’s most realistic is the way she seems to be stumbling before finding her way. Nothing is seamless in life. Everything is messy and complicated, and we often try to choose right from wrong without stopping to think that sometimes there is no wrong answer. It also goes to show that life is a marathon, and not a sprint. We can only hope the Gilmore Girls comes back to show us how our favorite small town girl finds her way.
