LORELAI: Sookie, this is not like the fruit bowl his mother gave you. You can’t stick four kids in the attic and just pull them out at Christmas.
This sounds suspiciously like a reference to the 1979 Gothic novel Flowers in the Attic by V.C. Andrews, the pen name of Cleo Virginia Andrews. The story is about four children, siblings named Chris, Cathy, Carrie, and Cory Dollanger, who are locked in an attic by their grandmother for more than three years, with the consent or encouragement of the children’s widowed mother. The book is the first in a series about the Dollanger siblings.
The book features rape, incest, and murder, and was described as “deranged swill” by one critic, but it was a bestseller. Lorelai has almost certainly read it – she would have been eleven at the time it was published, and it was so popular and shocking at the time that almost every teenage and preteen girl read it as part of a worldwide phenomenon.
The Annotated Gilmore Girls 