Despite my attempts to render our TV viewing a deliberately unpleasant experience, my daughter has been known to try it anyway. One night recently, she dragged me to the television, arguing that the show we were about to watch "is about us."

Why would she think that anything on the WB depicted her own life?

Because the show in question, "Gilmore Girls," was advertised as being about a mother and a daughter who were "just like sisters."

Big fucking deal, I thought as I watched. A show about a young mother and her teenage daughter, called "Gilmore Girls," as if they were the permanent junior auxiliary, the adjunct understudies to the just plain Gilmores. And I was not thrilled to see the "girls" swapping sweaters, dancing around the living room to XTC and, when they fought, retreating to their respective rooms with the same Macy Gray CD. What were the scriptwriters thinking? That parenting a teenager as a young mother is just like living with your favorite college roommate?

But I must admit that I did find parallels to our own lives that were downright eerie -- so eerie, in fact, that I fear if I ever decide to write my memoirs, I will find that the television rights already belong to Amy Sherman-Palladino of Dorothy Parker Productions. To begin with, Lorelai Gilmore and her daughter, Lorelai Gilmore, called Rory, are, like my daughter and I, 16 years apart in age. Like me, Lorelai has never been, nor as far as we know, ever attempted to be, married. They live in a small town in Connecticut, 30 minutes out of Hartford, where Rory attends an exclusive private school called Chilton. We spent four years in a small town 30 minutes out of Hartford where I attended a private university. Lorelai goes reluctantly into debt to her parents to finance Rory's education, and they in turn demand that she involve them in her life; I was financially dependent on my parents for my education, and they in turn demanded that they have a say in how I was raising my daughter.

Christ, Lorelai, played by the exquisite Lauren Graham, even looks like an actress I would choose to play me in the movie of my life -- she's even got my coloring: shoulder-length brown hair, blue eyes and perpetual red lipstick. Thank God, unlike me, she's tall.

Of course, there are some differences. Lorelai never went to college; I did. Lorelai is from an upper-middle-class family in Connecticut; I am from a middle-class family in Idaho. Rory and Lorelai are 16 and 32, respectively; Sydney and I are 11 and 27. Lorelai works as the director of a quaint New England inn; I work as an editor at a San Francisco Internet magazine. But the basic premise of the story is the same, and it is one that is almost never told: How does one assert one's independence as a parent when one is, in some ways, still in need of financial and emotional parenting oneself, in a culture that sees teenage mothers as nothing short of monstrous? And later, how does one deal with tensions of being a grown-up former teenage mother who has somehow, in most ways, become part of the middle class?

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