The Wedding People by Alison Espach

If you are still wondering which book to take on holiday with you this year, then just go and buy this one and you can thank me later. It is smart and funny and all those things you would want a book to be if you were going to write one. If you loved Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus, then you are going to love this too (and if you never got around to reading that, then add it to your holiday reading list right now).

There is a paragraph about the author at the front of this book, and the last line tells us that: 'She is a professor of creative writing at Providence College in Rhode Island.', and when I saw that I was all set to find a style of writing that was grammatically correct but a little short on readability. Wrong. If Alison Espach was teaching a writing course anywhere near me, I'd want to be first in the queue to listen to what she has to say. There is not one thing I want to find fault with in this novel.

The protagonist in the book, Phoebe Stone, is a professor of Victorian literature, and after a long while married, her husband (also a professor) has left her for one of their colleagues and she finds herself divorced and alone. On the second day of the fall semester she decides she just can't take the loneliness any more, and she books herself into a high end hotel by the beach in Rhode Island and simply walks out of the door with only her handbag and the clothes she stands up in. In her bag, she has a bottle of cats tranquilisers, and it is her intention to have a good meal in a lovely hotel room, and when she feels ready, she can just swallow all the pills and slip away.

When she arrives at the hotel, the rest of the building has been taken over by a wedding party, and as Phoebe is wearing her best silk dress, everyone around her just assumes that she is one of the wedding people. In fact, it becomes very hard not to be, and you will have to read the rest for yourself to find out how it all pans out.

There is a moral to this tale, and it is that none of us are very honest either with ourselves or with other people, and if that changed and people spoke only the truth, how different life could be.

Comments

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