She is one of the Wedding People now...

 

The Wedding People by Alison Espach

 

published 2024

 

 

Moodboard for a Coastal Wedding, borrowed from Pinterest

“You know what open-toed shoes are?” Lila asks.

“Is this a maid of honor test?” Phoebe asks.

 

 

This is a very unusual book, in that it veers between a couple of different styles of fiction, then will suddenly do something even more unexpected. I enjoyed it very much and would highly recommend it as satisfying, readable and involving.

The Wedding People has a dark and compelling setup. Phoebe is 40, her marriage has failed, she can’t have children, her academic career is on hold. She has had it. She decides to check into a very fancy hotel, have one last fabulous meal, then commit suicide. Yes, that’s a downer of a start, but at least you know it’s got to be up from here don’t you? And the chances are she is not going to succeed – at least for another 300+ pages.

Phoebe gets to her lovely coastal resort hotel in Newport Rhode Island, and as she waits to check in she realizes she is in the middle of a huge and fancy wedding party. She has been allotted a room by accident, as the wedding group is supposed to have taken over the whole hotel. But that’s not going to stop her – is it?

So over the next six days (this is one extended wedding) she slowly comes back to life, and becomes inextricably involved in the lives of several of the wedding party. The best bits come with the bride, Lila, 12 years younger than Phoebe and determined not to have her wedding spoiled

“if I wake up to your corpse being rolled into the lobby tomorrow morning, you should know I’ll never recover from something like that.”

The conversations between Lila and Phoebe are an absolute delight, the book lights up the moment they are in a room together, they had me roaring with laughter. They have very different views on life, and we find out the past history of each of them. (they reminded me – and this is a great compliment – of Audra and Elspeth in Katherine Heiny’s Standard Deviation). There is a cast of other relations of the bride and groom, and Phoebe ends up having a conversation with each of them, and it is a very clever way of giving us another POV, in not-too-formulaic manner. The resolution of various of the issues surrounding Phoebe and the wedding people can be a little bit fairy-tale/chicklit/wish fulfilment, but honestly – by that time you’re cheering them on.

It is slightly unconvincing that Phoebe is quite so good at solving others’ problems, and giving out advice, when she was not so good at her own life – but OK, we’ll give her a pass.

Meanwhile there are wonderful scenes along the way. Phoebe uses someone else’s phone to get GPS directions and keep seeing the very raunchy sexts sent by the woman’s husband.  A long discussion of an invented cocktail called Vacation in a Cup – is the plural VacationS or CupS? (And what about Sex on the Beach?). The descriptions of the bridal events – the Sex Woman talking about pandas, the Blending of the Families event, Phoebe’s search for ‘dick-themed compostable flatware’. “You omitted the palate cleansers? … this is unacceptable” (I have corrected the spelling in my edition – given as palette, tchah). it is all quite wonderful.

A while back on the blog we had the coastal grandmother (in a blogpost on Elizabeth Day’s The Magpie) Here we had this – Phoebe is talking to the recently hired ‘property manager’ at the hotel:

…“They told me I had to wear coastal business casual, and I honestly had to google it.” Pauline laughs like this is a great joke between the two of them, and Phoebe looks at her tight body-con black dress with an overly formal boat neckline. Normally, Phoebe wouldn’t say anything, but she feels bad for Pauline, a girl who showed up to her new life in the wrong dress.

“That’s not quite right,” Phoebe says gently.

“No?” Pauline asks, looking down at her outfit.

“The boat neck is a little formal.”

“I thought the boat neck was like, relaxed and boaty.”

“Try more blues. And whites. And loose linens.”

Later we see the effect of Phoebe’s words:

Pauline, too, has transformed this week—she wears a loose gauzy dress, with wavy beach hair cascading over her shoulders. And Phoebe feels proud.

Now, is this a thing? It was very hard to find any reference to it anywhere online, though there are many subsets of ‘coastal’ clothes. But I thought I’d give it a go.

 

What do we think of these outfits? Coastal business or not?

 

(dark blue dress from Etsy)

I think in the UK she could head to the White Company for some ideas. Lila the bride has lots of floaty white dresses for her varying events that would probably do too.

The wedding of John and Jackie Kennedy is referenced a couple of times in the book, in that very snooty way that I always enjoy, particularly when Americans tell me, apparently straight-faced, that there is no class-consciousness or snobbery in the USA, that it is entirely confined to England.

(I did a post on that very wedding here, and there are a number of posts featuring fictionalized or biographical versions of the Kennedy family.)  

You might be able to predict some of the plot turns and tropes in the book, but probably not all of them, and it is touching and life-affirming as well as very funny. A key pivot comes near the end:

So the transformation is complete: Phoebe is one of the wedding people now.

And by that time you care about all of them, all the wedding people…