In Review: The Wedding People by Alison Espach

I was first drawn to this book because: First, the cover design is some of the best I have seen produced by an American publication. Second,who doesn’t love weddings? The novel follows Phoebe, a woman who shows up at the Cornwall Inn. She has had enough of her life and decides to commit suicide—but before that, she wants to have one last hoorah in an emerald silk dress and gold shoes.

This book really grabbed my attention not only because of the plethora of literary references—from the story archetypes of Russian literature to how much she relates to Jane Eyre—but also because of the way Phoebe reflects on her own marriage. While she is observing the wedding party going about their business, she remembers that she

“got married in a public park, invited only their closest friends and family because they were suspicious of money, of grand gesture. The bigger the gesture, the emptier the feeling. The more wedding you need, the less happy you must be.”

She realizes that, at the time, she believed in the simplicity of their wedding. But now, as she looks at the splendor and excitement of the wedding about to happen, she feels that

“the utter simplicity of [her] life felt crushing” (Espach, 32).

This line struck me because Phoebe earned her doctorate in Victorian literature. I mention this because I know how scholarly and graduate culture tends to cultivate a suspicion of money, of glamour, of splendor. English departments (or at least mine) have fostered this idea that you have to divorce yourself from the pleasures of material life in order to prove you’ve cultivated a true life of the mind. A true intelectual can study materialism but must never stoop to being materialistic.

As the novel goes on, Phoebe finds a sense of joy in being alive again when she starts connecting with people on an emotional rather than intellectual level, when she decides to get a dog (rather than a cat), when she lets herself wear bright clothes, when she allows herself to enjoy putting on makeup. She admits that

“she used to feel some kind of professional obligation to despise the stuff, but if she is being honest with herself, she likes putting on make-up” (Espach, 225–226).

This private confession confirms something I’ve sensed myself: this unspoken pressure to reject anything that clearly costs money becase that makes you materialist, or to reject anything explicitly feminine, becase that makes you frivolous. For me, this novel was like sipping champagne after slogan through the drudgery that is literary theory—because of the way it implicitly celebrates the feminine.

The novel is not entirely uncritical of wedding culture. Through Lila’s character, both Phoebe and the reader become familiar with the intense pressures that surround weddings: the pressure to plan everything perfectly, to spend enough money to “accurately” reflect love (Lila spends a whopping million dollars on her wedding), the pressure to prove to your guests that you're experiencing the most spectacular and sentimental moment of your life. Through Lila, we see how the more money spent on a wedding, the more pressure there is for the event to live up to its cost.