In Lorelai's case, she worked her way up from chambermaid to executive director of the Independence Inn. (In my case, I worked my way through two years of high school, four years of college and two years of freelancing at night while holding down some very bad day jobs, like working customer service in a bank and editing the phone book.) It's a seductive formula for creating a character -- an upper-class girl whose breeding makes her elegant and attractive to viewers, and whose prodigal pregnancy makes her interesting. In this, she conflates two of the most pervasive American myths: She has the taste and pedigree of someone who was born knowing what to do with the silver spoon in her mouth and the independence of someone who has pulled herself up by her bootstraps.

It's not as if Lorelai's parents had nothing to do with her eventual success -- all of the skills that facilitated her rise from maid to manager are the skills that one acquires from undergoing 16 years of parental training in how to become an lady. And what kind of quaint inn would hide in housekeeping a gorgeous woman with an eye for the right crystal, one who knows a good mushroom risotto when she tastes it and has perfect pitch for how one talks to valets, businessmen with scratched cars and little old ladies looking for the best antiques in the city? (If she had been a mechanic or a plumber or a waitress at Denny's, it's unlikely that she would have been able to trade in her good breeding for upward mobility.)

The most visible "difference" between Lorelai and her parents seems to be that she is upper middle class and they are landed gentry. She has a sprawling white house stuffed with antiques and Laura Ashley prints, drives a new Jeep and eats out every night in a funky cafe around the corner. They have an even bigger white house with a gate and oak paneling, kitchen help whose names they can't remember and a country club membership.

Nevertheless, the scriptwriters insist, week after week, on framing the conflicts between Lorelai and her parents, and Lorelai and Rory and the Chilton set, in terms of class. In every episode, Lorelai breaks some social code and is ritually humiliated for her haplessness.

On Rory's first day at Chilton, for example, Lorelai oversleeps because her fuzzy clock doesn't purr on time, forgets to pick up her cute blue suit with the flippy skirt from the dry cleaner and ends up meeting with the dean of Chilton while dressed like a rodeo queen, in a pink tie-dyed T-shirt, Daisy Dukes and cowgirl boots. Of course, she has a respectable gray flannel coat to cover herself with, but her mother is waiting for her in the dean's office and insists that she remove her coat. In a later episode, she is late for a PTA meeting and is chastised for being one of the women who -- horrors! -- voted to amend the dress code to include scrunchies in Chilton plaid. ("They must be one of the scholarship families," murmurs one Chilton grande dame to another, prompting Lorelai to a spunky display that threatens to escalate to fisticuffs.)

These slapstick moments provide grist for the plot mill, but they ultimately fall flat. A true outsider is one who does not know that one should wear the blue suit with the flippy skirt to the first day of school, or if she does know it, she doesn't own it, or is proudly defiant that she isn't one of those rich bitches who follow the WASP dress code. A woman who can afford both the suit and the dry cleaning, but forgets to pick it up, is an insider with a time-management problem and maybe a few issues with handling responsibility.

It's not entirely unrealistic. We don't get the benefit of seeing the years between 16 and 32, after Lorelai had rejected her parents' money and before she came into her own. Presumably, a good many of these years provided the kind of material that makes for hardcore social documentary, not prime-time lifestyle drama. There are already more than enough of those stories in circulation, so many, in fact, that telling an airbrushed, sanitized version about teenage pregnancy is nearly revolutionary.

The truth is that there are teenage mothers -- not a lot, but some -- who do find themselves in a different, better place 10 years later. Including myself, I know three of them.

We are not all so telegenic. If they were filming my life, it would be set in two rooms, with no Laura Ashley in sight and, most days, laundry and books and old essays and journals strewn about in such a way that navigation, even in daylight, is something of a challenge. If they were filming my friend Tonya, you would see a three-bedroom apartment in the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn, N.Y., where she works as a corporate recruiter by day and writes her fiction on weekends. My friend Deb, a physicist turned computer geek, lives with her new boyfriend in Connecticut and drives a new VW bug. I don't expect we'll be inviting in any camera crews, but that's OK, because two of the three of us are writers, and fiction is better suited to capturing the nuance and ambiguity of daily life anyway.

After all, "Gilmore Girls" is not about nuance, it's not about art, it's television. I don't fault "Gilmore Girls" for presenting the pop version of affluent former teenage motherhood any more than I would critique "Married ... With Children" for its version of shoe salesmen, or berate the "The Cosby Show" for not accurately portraying affluent African-American life. After all, don't all Americans have the inalienable right to find themselves caricatured beyond recognition on television?

And in the meantime, anyone want to buy the rights to a book about a 27-year-old former teenage mother from Idaho?

Order "Mothers Who Think: Tales of Real-Life Parenthood" from the editors of Mothers Who Think.