Virginia Sole-Smith on Sookie's Styling, the Irredeemability of Logan, and the Incredible Shrinking Rory!
Welcome to Our New Interview Series: The Gilmore Women Questionnaire
Welcome to the first installment of the Gilmore Women Questionnaire! This month we had the opportunity to sit down with Virginia Sole-Smith, a genius journalist, New York Times bestselling author of the books FAT TALK: Parenting In The Age of Diet Culture and The Eating Instinct: Food Culture, Body Image and Guilt in America and the person behind one of our favorite Substacks: Burnt Toast. We found out several months ago that not only was Virginia a fellow Gilmore Girls watcher but she also reads Gilmore Women! We were thrilled to hear she was using the newsletter as a jumping-off point to talk about some of the more problematic parts of the series with her 10-year-old daughter. But we also knew she must have some brilliant thoughts about the show to share, so we decided to ask.
Stay tuned as we roll out more of these questionnaires with other folks you may or may not know as we dive into the final season of this quirky, nostalgic, problematic, and still lovable show. (Yes, we will do the Netflix revival, but we don’t consider it a “real season,” thank you for coming to our Ted talk.)
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Yay! On to our conversation with Virginia!
Love,
Maggie & Megan
Welcome to Gilmore Women: Two journalists discuss everything that’s wrong with every episode of Gilmore Girls & why we still love it.
GILMORE WOMEN: Do you remember the first time you saw Gilmore Girls? And if you do, do you remember the context at all?
VIRGINIA SOLE-SMITH: I was either in college or recently out of college … I was not in season 1 when I first was watching … Oh, I do remember the first episode I watched! It’s all coming back. It was the part 2 of the Rory-sleeps-with-Dean episodes.
Oh. Wow. That’s a drama!
So the thing was, I have a younger sister who’s 9 years younger than me, so I’m 42, she’s 33. So she was watching it, so I was either away at college and she was still at home or I was already in New York or whatever, and then I was home over Christmas break type of thing. And she was really into it, and said, “You should watch this with me.” And I was sort of like, “I don’t know, I’m very cool and I’m older than you…” And so then she’s giving me the backstory of the previous episode. So my first experience with it was Dean sitting on the steps with that whole scene playing out in the house, which is a very weird way to watch it for the first time!
Oh my god! Did you hate Dean at the moment?
I think because you know, when you come into a show, you’re like, I don't even really know who everyone is, I’m just trying to get my bearings. So I was kind of like “He seems whatever.” I had no thoughts about him because I was just like, what is this mother-daughter situation? But then I did very quickly go back and started working my way through it chronologically. And by then, I was super into it. And now I am definitely very much not Team Dean.
How would you describe your relationship to Gilmore Girls at that time? And how has that relationship changed during previous rewatches and up to now?
I have rewatched many times. So I am from Connecticut. I do have a younger sister as referenced, but my parents are divorced, and she's my half-sister on my dad’s side. So I have a mom for whom I am her only daughter. We’re very close. I also really love books. I wanted to be a journalist. So one could say there was a lot about the show, that was you know, tailor-made for me. And my mom does not come from an old money Connecticut family, but she is British. My family is not like upper-class British, but I had a scary British grandmother. It was very immediately a comfort watch. Like just you know obsessed with, full-on love affair sort of thing. I mean, the first times through, it was the show that I would put on to rewatch when I was really buried in work deadlines and needed a brain break on my lunch hour or a good comfort watch in the evenings. It was something that I pretty uncritically adored the first several times I went through it, and then became more critical as I wizened with age.