- Narrator: Bishop's own voice is the reason to choose the recording, and the foreword's reader, announced in capitals before anything else on this listing, appears nowhere in the credit.
- Subjects: six decades of stage and screen work, a marriage to a gambler, grief and reinvention after loss
- Tone: Warm, unsentimental, told at speed
- Bottom line: A life delivered by the person who lived it, on a page that misplaces both its second reader and its photographs.
A foreword written and read by Amy Sherman-Palladino is the first thing this description advertises, in capital letters, with an exclamation point at the end. The audiobook credit names Kelly Bishop and nobody else. So the recording holds at least two voices while the page acknowledges exactly one, which is an odd way to handle the single element that makes an audio edition of this memoir different from the printed one. Six hours and forty-eight minutes, Simon & Schuster Audio, September 17, 2024, and a second reader you will meet only by pressing play.
Have It Read by Emily Gilmore
Amy Sherman-Palladino created Gilmore Girls, the show that made Bishop a household face after a long career of other work, and handing that particular person the way in is not a small piece of value. The copy knows it, which is why the line sits in capitals at the very top of the description. What the copy will not tell you is how long the foreword runs, where it falls, or whether Sherman-Palladino returns anywhere afterward. The credit offers no assistance on any of that, because Sherman-Palladino is nowhere on it.
Kelly Bishop reads her own book, and one written response argues for that better than any marketing line manages. Laura Matson Hahn, in January 2026, says you will hear Kelly Bishop's voice in your head. That was written about the printed edition, and it is precisely the case for skipping print: the voice is available for the asking. The reviewer signing as DJO gets there more bluntly, heading a five-star entry with the note that if you get the audiobook, you can have it read to you by Emily Gilmore. That headline is the strongest sales argument anywhere on the listing, and the publisher did not write it.
Four Whole-Star Votes Cannot Total 4.6
Five people have written about this memoir and the counter under the star badge says four. Worse, 4.6 cannot be produced by four whole-star votes under any rounding convention you care to apply. So the badge is describing something other than the column you can read, and that column shows four fives and a four. The gap is small and nothing about it looks sinister, but it is worth registering before you treat a rounded number as a verdict delivered by real listeners.
Simon & Schuster Audio has six hours and forty-eight minutes to cover six decades in show business, and the compression is the entire design. A Chorus Line, and a Tony Award for the original Broadway cast. Dirty Dancing, as Jennifer Grey's mother. Gilmore Girls, as Emily. Then the parts the show never touched: an early switch from dance into drama, a young marriage to a compulsive gambler, marching for women's rights, and losing a second husband to cancer. That is an enormous amount of ground per hour, and the copy is honest that this arrives as a collection of stories rather than a chronology. Hannah's four-star response is the only reservation posted here: interesting and fun, with some genuinely profound moments, but not overly inspiring and not, in the end, life changing.
Reading the pull quote at the top tells you exactly what the publisher expects you to want. Come for the Gilmore Girls anecdotes, stay for the revealing truths about what it takes to build a lifelong career in and out of Hollywood, says The A.V. Club. That is an accurate trade, and one long five-star response bears it out: it opens on Carole Bishop the chorus line dancer, spends most of its length on the ballet studio and the breakout on Broadway, and only reaches the series regular in its final stretch.
A Trigger Warning List the Copy Skips
Nothing in the publisher's copy prepares you for the list DJO drops into the middle of a five-star response. Abortion, death of a spouse, death of a parent, grief, misogyny, cancer, addiction, child abuse, infidelity, domestic abuse, terminal illness, alcoholism, sexual assault. This is a warm, unapologetic and spirited memoir, in the description's own words, and also all of that. The copy names the gambler and it names the cancer, then leaves the rest for a stranger on the internet to itemize, which is a gap a listener would rather have closed before starting.
Its most audio-specific response says nothing whatsoever about the audio. DJO leads with a headline built entirely around the recording, then delivers a form: a rating out of five, a spice score of zero, a primary genre, the trigger warning list, and a favorite quote about preferring the company of animals to the company of people. The quote is genuinely lovely and it is cut off mid-word, at their capacity to love an. Whatever DJO meant to say about hearing Emily Gilmore read this book, the response never circles back to it.
The description also promises a special collection of personal and professional photographs, a sentence that means nothing at all in this format. No line on this page mentions a companion document, and the copy makes no adjustment for the medium it is now selling. Anyone buying the recording for the pictures is buying air. It is the foreword problem inverted: one element the audio has that the page refuses to credit, and one element the print has that the page refuses to withdraw.
Brent's Entire Contribution Runs Three Words
One kind of listener here is obvious and one is not. The obvious one watched Gilmore Girls and wants six hours of Emily talking about her own life, which is what this delivers and what the responses confirm from several directions at once. The less obvious one has never seen an episode and is curious about what a working career in American theater and film actually looked like across six decades, which is the half of the book the A.V. Club quote is quietly pointing at. Brent's entire five-star contribution runs to three words and an exclamation point, which tells you how much of this audience simply wanted the thing to exist.
Fans of the show who want dish and nothing else should calibrate first. Leave it alone if what you want is a Gilmore Girls oral history, because the series is one chapter inside a life that also holds Broadway, a Tony, Dirty Dancing and two marriages. Leave it alone, too, if that content list is a problem, since the memoir goes at every item on it directly rather than glancingly. You will not get a nostalgia tour here, and the page never promised one, whatever those capital letters at the top imply.
