PotsandPlots

Last month, I joined a new book group (part of the Chapter 25 commercially run enterprise). I enjoyed the experience and am looking forward to this month’s meeting. Even more so after reading June’s choice, The Wedding People by Alison Espach

Growing Information:

Plant With: Contemporary Fiction, Relationships, Life is Messy.

Grows Into: A moving examination of doing the best that we can.

Rating: Hardy Perennial 🌻🌻🌻(Check here for rating information.)

Available now in paperback (affiliate link).

The Review:

I really enjoyed The Wedding People. It’s a borderline hardy perennial, but ultimately it’s worth the accolade. It was somewhat out of my comfort zone – unsurprisingly, the book group skews female, and I suspect many of its reading choices will too. (Whatever that means!)

The Wedding People tells the story of Phoebe Stone, an English professor, checking into a fancy hotel. Her aim? To kill herself.

Phoebe has somehow managed to check into a wonderful room at a hotel that has otherwise been taken over by a wedding for the entire week.

The bride, Lila, has planned everything to the nth degree (and beyond). Her millionaire father left her the money when he died, and she is going to ensure that the wedding is perfect.

You can sort of see where the story is going to go from there, but The Wedding People is not about the destination. It’s all about the journey.

What Is a Perfect Wedding?

Lila and Phoebe end up talking, and Phoebe confesses what she is about to do. Her marriage has collapsed, her job is a failure, and her life is not panning out the way she wanted it to. Lila is horrified. Not for Phoebe, but for her wedding plans. Lila, on the face of it, is self-centred, but as she opens up to Phoebe, we see another side of her.

Phoebe finds herself drawn to Lila, and somehow finds herself not taking her own life, but instead becoming inexorably drawn into the wedding party.

What follows becomes an examination of families, life and love. The things that don’t work, the things that do. The things that did work, then, for some reason, stop. The unexpected pitfalls that derail marriages and lives.

Alison Espach gains great mileage from Phoebe being an English professor. She has a wealth of literary experience about love and marriage to draw on. One book that particularly informs The Wedding People is Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, so much so, I bought a copy and started it straight afterwards.

Having done so (and from listening to a recent episode of “The Book Club” podcast), I was able to see little bits picked out by Espach that give a nod to Woolf’s classic.

What Is a Perfect Marriage?

While I might have expected a book about a society wedding to have been large on froth and low on substance, The Wedding People had surprising depth. I was thinking about it for some time afterwards. I still think on it now.

It is probably impossible to read The Wedding People and not muse on your own life. Roads not taken, assumptions made about where you might be going. One of its strengths is its revelations of internal dialogues (another way in which it mirrors Mrs Dalloway). The conversations we have with ourselves. I don’t think I’ve ever read anything before that has made me consider other people’s internal thought processes so deeply. Particularly, my wife’s

When you’ve been married for 20+ years, it’s easy to take one another for granted. But perhaps, maybe, you don’t know the person next to you after all? Perhaps you think you understand how they are feeling, but maybe you’re wrong. Not necessarily in a bad way, but just, as you become comfortable, you think you know each other, and yet each of you is evolving. Perhaps priorities, wants, and needs have changed.

Perhaps your own needs have changed, and you haven’t even noticed that. Modern life doesn’t allow much time for introspection. Perhaps we all need a million-dollar wedding to help us find ourselves.

The Wedding People is a very good read. There are a million ways that Espach could have botched the ending, but she delivered something satisfactory and believable that fitted with all that had come before, without taking away her character’s agency.

This is a book that prompts you to reassess yourself. Check that you’re happy and check that those around you are happy too. It suggests that while not all problems are solvable, most of them are a lot more manageable if approached with honesty.

The Wedding People is an excellent piece of fiction. I opened by saying that I thought it was only just worthy of being rated a hardy perennial. Over the course of writing this review, I have come to appreciate its depths and realised even more just how good it is.