The wedding people

Some books make you cry. Others make you laugh. And then there are the ones that manage to make you laugh whiletying your stomach into a knot. Wedding People, by Alison Espach, is one of those.

 

I couldn’t tell you if it’s a novel about grief, about other people’s weddings, or about the existential discomfort of being in the right place at the absolutely wrong time. But I do know this: it’s so well written it made me laugh out loud while reading scenes that—had they happened to me—would’ve left me in bed for three days.

 

The narrator’s voice is so honest, so uncomfortably honest, that at times I felt like I was inhabiting her body. I could smell the cloying hotel perfume, feel the sticky heat of the dress that just wouldn’t zip up, and most of all—the discomfort. Not the physical kind, but the existential one. The what am I doing here?, the this isn’t mine, the why does everyone else seem to know what they’re doing except me?

 

And in the middle of that discomfort, humor shows up. Not the easy-laugh kind, but a sharper, more existential kind—the kind that appears just as you’re beginning to lose your footing. Like when she writes:

 

“It’s basically like being on a sinking ship. Except you’re never allowed to acknowledge that the ship is sinking.”

 

There it is: the absurdity of social rituals, the repression of emotion, and that thread of irony that keeps the narrator (and us, the readers) afloat in the middle of the wreck.

 

The story, which in other hands might have veered into melodrama, becomes in Espach’s hands a kind of emotional observational comedy. A lucid comedy. As if Joan Didion and Phoebe Waller-Bridge had run away together to write from a wedding hotel in Connecticut.

 

And then there are those lines that bounce around in your head like something a brilliantly sharp friend would whisper to you at just the right moment:

 

“Seems more plausible that Hell is some revenge fantasy concocted by unhappy people so they could punish all the happy people in their minds.”

 

A line like that doesn’t just make you laugh. It makes you think. And that, in a novel about grief, other people’s love, and the strange codes of social behavior, feels like a tiny miracle.

 

Yes, it made me laugh. But not in a light, disposable way. It made me laugh because it reminded me that life, even in its most absurd and painful moments, often looks a lot like a badly acted comedy in an empty theater.

 

And maybe that’s where the comfort lies.