Book By: Alison Espach
Imagine this: you’ve been betrayed, your marriage has fallen apart, and you’re depressed to the point of wanting to end your life. And then, suddenly, you meet a few happy strangers, share a drink or two, and within a couple of days, your depression is magically gone. Sounds unrealistic, right? That’s exactly how The Wedding People felt to me.
The novel follows Phoebe Stone, who has just attempted suicide and checks into a hotel that happens to host weddings. It’s a setup full of potential- grief and despair colliding with the joy and chaos of weddings. But instead of really exploring that contrast, the book skips ahead to an easy turnaround. Within less than a week, Phoebe goes from suicidal thoughts to giving life another chance because she makes some new friends and even develops a crush on a groom.
I usually love sad novels. I seek out books that deal honestly with depression, trauma, and messy emotions. And I don’t mind when writers use humor to soften hard truths- humor can be a powerful way of coping. But here, suicide felt more like a plot device than a genuine part of the story.
What frustrated me most was how lightly the novel treated mental health. Healing doesn’t work like this. Grief, trauma, depression- they take time, patience, and setbacks. They don’t vanish because you meet a few new people or catch feelings for the wrong guy. To pretend otherwise makes the story feel shallow, even ignorant.
Strip away the heavy themes, and you’re left with a very familiar plot: a woman cheated on by her husband, devastated, then suddenly “finding herself” through friendship and romance. Beyond cliché.
I finished the book feeling disappointed. It could have been something raw and moving, but instead it was predictable and surface-level.
Notes#
- There is no such thing as a happy place. Because when you are happy, everywhere is a happy place. And when you are sad, everywhere is a sad place.
- But Bob said, “You think too much,” and it genuinely surprised her. Wasn’t that a good thing? Wasn’t that the entire point of being an academic?
- The more weddings you need, the less happy you must be.
- He went outside to look at the stars because that’s what people have done since the beginning of time.
- She refuses to spend her last hours on this planet worrying. She has spent too much time worrying about what to drink, where to vacation, what to wear, what to say, was it hotter to write cum or come, and what was the point?
- Phoebe expected more from the ocean, maybe because she read too many Herman Melville books in which the ocean knows everything about the future- foreshadows death with every wild and loud crash of a wave. But so be it.
- For the past ten years, there has been too much to do and not enough time. There was the dissertation that needed to become a book, the research that needed to become PowerPoints, the sex that needed to become a baby, and the students that needed her to run their lives.
- “Seems more plausible that Hell is some revenge fantasy concocted by unhappy people so they could punish all the happy people in their minds.”
- Every man must come to terms with his true nature at the end of his life, and it is time I do the same.
- It’s three a.m. The grief hour, according to Phoebe’s therapist. The demon hour, according to medieval peasants. The hour that you wake up when you have excess cortisol in your body, according to a doctor Phoebe once saw.
- One moment of pretending to be great leads to the next moment of pretending to be great, and ten years later, she realizes she’s spent her entire life just pretending to be great.
- This is the gift random strangers can give you, Phoebe is realizing- the freedom to say or be anything around them. Because who cares? He doesn’t know her, will never know her. He will list all kinds of reasons why she shouldn’t die, and she will tell him that she is not planning to die anymore, and then they will get out of the hot tub and carry on with their lives and never think about each other again.
- Now she knows what it feels like to be beyond the traditional plot points of a life, to sit on a chair in an empty room, feeling like there is nothing more than this solemn march forward. Yet, there must be something else. She is suddenly gripped with such curiosity that it feels primal. She needs to know: After the war, after the marriage, after the suicide- what happens next?
- Maybe in the dark, everyone seems more alone than they are.
- Phoebe thinks it’s amazing how easily children ask questions. They don’t think there’s anything wrong with it. They know that they don’t know everything, and it’s a little jarring to Phoebe, a woman who spent her entire career pretending that she had been born knowing everything.
- And maybe they are all lonely. Maybe this is just what it means to be a person. To constantly reckon with being a single being in one body. Maybe everybody sits up at night and creates arguments in their head for why they are the loneliest person in the world.
- And it’s true. How easy it is to be dead. How lucky to be alive, even for just one day.
- She had not yet become the real Edith Wharton. Not yet divorced. Not yet a novelist. Not yet a war correspondent in France. She wonders how terrifying it felt, not to know any of this about herself, to sit out on this big lawn, looking at the sea, feeling like she was at the very end of it all. She wonders what it was that made her realize there was somewhere else to go.
- The past is like the Gran Cavallo, and you can’t fix the Gran Cavallo, right? I mean, sure, who doesn’t fantasize about drawing in the rest of the horse, and maybe the sky around the horse? But what would the painting be worth then? Absolutely nothing. So it is what it is. Imperfect, unfinished, forever. We just have to move on, call it a masterpiece, even if it’s not, and start working on a new goddamned painting.
- She wonders if her feelings for Gary could be a new form of love, one she’s never known before: love without expectation. Love that you are just happy enough to feel. Love that you don’t try to own like a painting.
- It’s beautiful. And sad. Beautiful because it’s sad or sad because it’s beautiful.
- But maybe this is why Lila has no real friends, Phoebe thinks. She doesn’t know how to keep them. She keeps trading them in for something else.
- He has learned he was never really good at saying what he thought. He is learning now how to do this more. Learning how to actually talk.
- Becoming who you want to be is just like anything else. It takes practice. It requires belief that one day, you’ll wake up and be a natural at it.
Cover photo from Book Club Chat