This is a pretty breezy show-biz memoir by someone who’s done it all, but without all that much to say about it unfortunately. As the title gets at, she is best known today for her role as Emily Gilmore, matriarch of the title family on Gilmore Girls. As a domineering, patrician mother with a strained relationship with her daughter Lorelai, and as a doting, supportive grandmother to her granddaughter Rorry, Bishop was note-perfect. Gilmore Girls fans will be pleased to learn that Bishop remains close to her co-stars as well as the show’s co-creator Amy Sherman-Palladino, who also wrote this book’s introduction.
The memoir starts with Bishop’s early work as a dancer, eventually leading to her landing a role in the original cast of A Chorus Line, for which she would be awarded with a Tony. After such a spectacular Broadway debut, it’s a bit disappointing to realize that Bishop has only sporadically returned to Broadway in the intervening decades, without anywhere near as much success. Bishop provides great detail about her time understudying Stockard Channing in the original cast of Six Degrees of Separation, mostly going through her contract negotiations after taking over the role late in the run.
The business aspect of show business gets a lot of attention from Bishop. A career downturn in the 80s turns out to be the fault of a neglectful agent who turned down projects for Bishop without even telling her about them. Her career gets a boost when she shows up to the set of Dirty Dancing and finds out that she’s been bumped up from a small cameo role to that of Jennifer Grey’s mother. (Her established friendship with Jerry Orbach made the shoot a joy, by the way.) Even with Gilmore Girls Bishop goes into detail about how she got the studio to cover her travel to and from the East Coast where she lived to the California shooting set.
Bishop is candid about her personal life, talking about her failed first marriage, bad relationships, and lack of interest in starting a family. Eventually, she meets and marries the broadcaster Lee Leonard, who is mostly remembered for being an early anchor on both ESPN and CNN. Bishop’s love for Leonard comes through quite clearly, as her career occasionally takes a backseat to his multiple bouts of cancer. After Leonard’s death, Bishop returns to work, but her recent work has mostly been in little-seen TV shows, making the book’s final chapters a bit of a bummer.
Bishop narrates the audiobook herself, and her distinctive, familiar voice makes the memoir a charming listen, even as the content occasionally underwhelms.
