Book Review: The Third Gilmore Girl
Title: The Third Gilmore Girl
Author: Kelly Bishop
Read by: Kelly Bishop
Audiobook Length:6hr. 49 min.
What's it about?
The Third Gilmore Girl is the brief origin store of Kelly Bishop, focusing more on her career, her trials and tribulations in the business
and her successes. She talks about her relationship with her mother, some of her romantic relationships and how she navigated the world of entertainment with pride and strength.
My Thoughts:
As a big fan of Gilmore Girls, I was happy to dive into this book to learn more about one of my favorite shows and, essentially, Emily Gilmore herself. To be honest, if that’s why you’re here, you might want to rethink. But, somehow, even though there wasn’t a lot on Gilmore Girls, I wasn’t disappointed.
I went in blind. I knew little about Ms. Kelly Bishop other then she enjoyed playing Emily, she was Baby’s mother in Dirty Dancing and she used to be a professional dancer. I knew that she was beloved by many. Let me tell you, what I didn’t know about her could fill a book…and this is pretty much that book!
There’s a lot of this book that focuses on her life as a dancer, her successes, her dreams and her relationships (spoiler alert, her love life was not something magical). Through the pages of The Third Gilmore Girl, we get to see her dream and the path that she took to get to where she is now. I expected to see Emily and, to some degree, I do. Kelly is witty, strong and knows her worth. Kelly, like Emily, will settle for nothing less then what she deserves and what she has earned and I loved that strength in her! I envied her ability to walk away if she wasn’t awarded her dues and to know, without being full of her self, that she deserved something she didn’t get. But what Kelly had of Emily in these ways, she lacked in cruelty, superficialness and vapidness. She had no need for that;no desire to stand upon others and look down on them, even if she did knew she was talented.
I was surprised to see that while Ms.Bishop would demand her worth in so many facets of her life, she didn’t do so in her love life. I was surprised to see her, time and again, settle for men who were not on her level. I had expected her to have strong, no nonsense personal relationships as she did outside of the home.
May favorite thought, though, was learning Kelly’s place in the creation and origin of A Chorus Line. While I had never seen the production nor really even know anything about it, the fact that I didn’t know that Kelly was a part of the origin wasn’t a surprise, however, I had never dreamed that the origin and Kelly’s part in it fascinated me and absolutely inspired me to stream the movie soon after reading the book. I felt like it gave me a perspective of the movie that colored the way I saw and injected the movie itself.
As a final note, I do want to say that listening to Ms. Bishop read her own work and share the stories of her life helped to make the experience even better. I’m usually a fan of listening to the author read their audiobook but this time, there was just something even more impactful about hearing her husky voice deliver the words that her younger self had slung, something about the way she relived her childhood that just added an extra umph to it.
I rate this book a
7
out of
10 flesh colored leotards
But, that’s just what I thought about it. What did you think? Did you know the bulk of her story? Did you find it boring, or were you enthralled in watching it all play out even if you knew how it ended for the most part? Let us know in the comments!
And, if you want to hear more about my thoughts as I read The Third Gilmore Girl,listen to season 2, episode 2 of our Podcast Saturday Night in where I talk about my experience reading this book and others here!
