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Jenna Bush Hager chose her August 2024 Read With Jenna pick with wedding season in mind.
“The Wedding People” by Alison Espach unfolds over a wedding weekend as two women’s opposing plans converge, and compete, at a luxurious hotel in Newport, Rhode Island.
"It’s about where we are when we're in the middle of our life and expectations versus reality. It’s about love and friendship and finding that love when you least expect it. I think you will love this book if you want to laugh, maybe shed a couple tears, but also just have a lot of fun," Jenna says.
"Wedding People" by Alison Espach
The book opens on Phoebe Stone, a professor who is “in a really tough place in her life,” Jenna says.
After her marriage ends, she decides her life is going to end, too. She drives to the penthouse of the Cornwall Hotel with the intention of taking her own life.
“The only issue is that the hotel has been rented for a wedding. She becomes part of the wedding. Hilarity and love ensue,” Jenna says.
Speaking to TODAY, author Espach says she started the book because she wanted a light project after her last book, "Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance."
She envisioned a woman who runs off to a hotel. At first, she didn’t know why the woman went to the hotel.
“I cycled through a bunch of different ideas that felt very fun to me, like she’s an assassin, or she’s here to meet an ex lover,” she says.
Eventually, she started writing the opening scene, in which the bride, Lila, asks Phoebe, over and over, why she’s at the hotel.
“Which is really my question, you know?” Espach says. “I just wrote, ‘I’m here to kill myself.’ I was very I was excited by that scene, but I was also very nervous about it. I thought, like, that’s not fun.”
Once Phoebe “revealed her plan for the evening,” Espach says she knew there was “no other story” she was going to tell — but she wasn’t ready to tell it.
“I heard a voice saying, ‘No, no, no, you can’t write this.’ This was actually the same voice as the bride’s saying, ‘No, no, no, you can’t be sad here’ to Phoebe. ‘No, you can’t bring this baggage into my hotel or into my wedding.’ That was a really interesting realization for me,” she says.
After sitting with the story, she came to “value the honesty” of the book, and felt she was able to explore Phoebe’s story.
“I valued that just a little bit more than than the fear that I had of of broaching a slightly darker subject,” she says.
The book evolved by exploring Phoebe and Lila’s surprisingly similar positions, even at first they seem oppositional.
“Here are these two women who are experiencing, like, the most important week of their life for very different reasons. Their experiences are heightened. They’re about to make these big, permanent decisions and change their their lives forever. It was a place to start exploring the kind of connection could could grow and evolve out of that similarity between them,” she says.
Phoebe’s honesty has a “contagious effect” on Lila and the other wedding guests, Espach says.
“It encourages the bride to start admitting things that she thought were too dark or too scary to admit,” she says.
Espach channeled her years working photo booths at weddings for the book’s dynamics. Wearing a cocktail dress at the reception, Espach says attendees often mistook her for a guest, not a vendor.
“I ended up attracting other unhappy, lonely people in the room who felt like outsiders at the wedding for whatever reason. They saw me as this refuge. I had so many interesting conversations. I could feel that I was providing them some kind of release from role that they’ve had to perform for the last three or four days,” she says.
Phoebe’s sadness contrasts with how a wedding is supposed to be — and that’s exactly what Espach wanted to explore.
“I chose the wedding as the main event because it’s one of the hardest places to be if you’re sad or feeling lonely. I’ve been that person. I’m sure everyone has been that person at a wedding, struggling to keep whatever’s going on inside,” she said.