From Rock Bottom to Rooftop Toasts: A Story of Unexpected Healing

 

Weddings can be scary.  As an event there are so many moving parts.  Many women look forward to this date for as long as they can remember and because of this they morph into someone they don't even recognize, bridezilla.  I truly hope I was not a bridezilla.  

The Wedding People by Alison Espach is a Read With Jenna book club pick. Jenna Bush Hager selected it for her Today Show book club in August 2024. 

You can tell the moment Phoebe Stone steps on the elevator that something is not quite right.

She arrives at the grand Cornwall Inn wearing a marvelous green dress and gold heels. .She has no luggage.  She’s immediately mistaken by everyone in the lobby for one of the wedding people, but she’s actually the only guest at the Cornwall who isn’t here for the big event. She’s has dreamed of coming to this spot with her husband so that they might enjoy shucking oysters and taking sunset sails but she is alone.

Unfortunately, life doesn't turn out exactly as you have envisioned it bottom, and determined to have one last decadent splurge on herself. Meanwhile, the bride has accounted for every detail and every possible disaster the weekend might yield except for, well, Phoebe and Phoebe's plan—which makes it that much more surprising when the two women can’t stop confiding in each other.

In turns absurdly funny and devastatingly tender, Alison Espach’s The Wedding People is ultimately an incredibly nuanced and resonant look at the winding paths we can take to places we never imagined—and the chance encounters it sometimes takes to reroute us.

My favorite theme of this book is how unexpected connections can change the course of our lives.  It happened to me when I boarded an Amtrak train bound for DC and ended up sitting next to a man who is now my husband.

Have you experienced an unexpected connection?  Please share.

Another question: Have you been part of the planning of your wedding?  Were you a Bridzilla?

Weddings in the Time of COVID - The Guest List

To me Weddings are extremely stressful.  I know mine was.  My husband and I were all about having the wedding in front of the Justice of the Peace but my Dad was not having it.

When I met my husband and we decided to get married he was in the military stationed at Walter Reed but in the middle of the planning he was sent to a base in Virginia about an hour from Richmond,  He then got his orders to go overseas so there were a lot of moving parts.  I had a job that I loved that required me to be on the road 4 days a week.

The wedding was in New York so I would end up flying to New York 2 times a month from where ever I was.  It was exhausting.  Plus we still wanted a simple wedding which was a little too simple for my family so it turned out somewhere in the middle.  I had also only met my husband's family once before all of this and planning a wedding is not a good time to be getting to know your in-laws.

This book is all about the wedding of a magazine publisher Jules and her handsome reality show fiancee.  Jules wants everything to be perfect and it does start out that way until the guests arrive.  The main characters all have a lot of baggage and I don't mean the kind you pack your clothes in, I mean emotional baggage.  Top that off with the remote location of the wedding venue and the fact that a dead body turns up and you have a real page turning novel.

I loved how the author wove all the character story lines together.  This is a great summer read.