Honesty is Contagious: A Guest Post by Alison Espach
Weddings are hard enough without getting thrown into one unexpectedly. Our brand-new Book Club pick from Alison Espach is a big-hearted, witty and tender tale, and we couldn’t wait to catch up with Alison to discover what drove her to write this story. Read on for her exclusive essay on how The Wedding People came to be and what she hopes her readers learn from it.
Hardcover $28.99
The Wedding People (Barnes & Noble Book Club Edition)
The Wedding People (Barnes & Noble Book Club Edition)
Hardcover $28.99
The author of the acclaimed Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance (one of our former Fiction Monthly Picks) cordially invites us to the Cornwell Inn. With a tender heart and a wry sense of humor, this is a thoughtful gem of a story.
The author of the acclaimed Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance (one of our former Fiction Monthly Picks) cordially invites us to the Cornwell Inn. With a tender heart and a wry sense of humor, this is a thoughtful gem of a story.
There is a long explanation for why I wrote The Wedding People, but here is the much shorter one—I was sad once! (Gasp). At a wedding! (Bigger gasp). And I was deeply ashamed of that sadness. Because a wedding is a terrible place to feel sad. A wedding is sort of like a play that all your friends and family have committed to putting on, and the play is called We Are All So Happy and Accomplished Right Now, and admitting to any kind of despair can feel like you’re ruining the whole production. I longed for someone I could talk to honestly, someone who had nothing at all to do with the wedding, someone who would just let me be whatever I was. Someone exactly like Phoebe Stone.
When Phoebe arrives at the Cornwall Inn, she comes alone, with no luggage, at rock bottom. She knows nobody at the hotel, which confuses Lila, the bride-to-be who booked the entire hotel for her wedding. At first, Lila can only imagine the ways that Phoebe will ruin her plan for the week, and Phoebe can only imagine the ways that Lila’s wedding will ruin her secret plan: to end her life at this hotel.
After Phoebe unexpectedly blurts out her plan to Lila, the two women are drawn towards each other. Lila finds herself opening up to Phoebe about things she can’t tell anyone else at the wedding, especially not the groom. Around Phoebe, Lila is freed from her performance as the happy bride-to-be. And around Lila, Phoebe finds herself increasingly distracted by the dysfunction of the wedding people and entangled in their drama.
It’s not easy to be a person. Harder to be a person at a wedding. Especially when you feel stuck in your life. Or when you can’t tell the difference between who you want to be and who you think you’re supposed to be. Or when you’re standing at the rehearsal dinner, telling people that you’re totally fine being all alone in this world while trying to eat a bacon-wrapped scallop in one bite. Most of the time, honesty can feel inappropriate; sometimes, it feels cataclysmic.
But what if you were honest anyway? What if you just said the thing you feel like you’re never supposed to say? What happens then? I wanted to write a novel that tries to answer these questions, one that reminds people of something I need to be reminded of about every other day—honesty can create bridges. Honesty is the first step towards actually knowing people. Phoebe’s honesty is contagious—she is the permission these wedding people need to stop pretending and be who they really are. And what’s more fun than watching people figure out who they really are in the middle of a wedding? And while I certainly had a lot of fun writing this book, I hope you have more while reading it.
