Ya-Ya Sisterhood

RORY: And the next thing I know, I’m being pulled out of my bed in the middle of the night and I’m blindfolded and then before I know it, I end up here with the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, reciting poetry and lighting candles, and now I’m gonna be suspended because I was trying to do what you told me?

Rory is referring to the 1996 novel, Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, by American author Rebecca Wells, the sequel to a 1992 short story collection, Little Altars Everywhere. The story is about the disintegrating relationship between an unusual mother and daughter named Vivi and Sidda.

While Sidda is holed up in a cabin the woods to think things through, Vivi’s childhood friends intervene to bring the pair back together by convincing Vivi to mail Sidda her childhood scrapbook, Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood – the Ya-Ya Sisterhood being the secret society Vivi and her friends formed in 1930s Louisiana, in rebellion against Southern social codes of the times. The Ya-Ya Sisterhood devised its own bizarre initiation rites, based on an imaginary Native American mythos.

The novel was well reviewed and reached #1 on the New York Times Best Seller List. It was famous enough that Rory doesn’t need to have read it to know about it, but I can’t see any reason why she wouldn’t have. The focus on a powerful but flawed mother-daughter relationship would surely have attracted both Lorelai and Rory to the novel. Rory’s derogatory comment might suggest that if she did read it, she didn’t think much of it.

The book was made into a film starring Sandra Bullock which was released in June 2002, but Rory can’t be referring to that, because it hasn’t happened yet.