by Alison Espach ★★★★★
Phoebe Stone has hit rock bottom. Recently divorced from her husband, she still must endure working at the same university as him and the woman he slept with. She has been fine-tuning her PhD dissertation for years but can't seem to chisel through her writer's block. Her job as an adjunct professor barely pays the bills and provides little joy. And so she flees her home in St. Louis with nothing but the green dress she's wearing and a few important accompaniments in her purse.
Her destination is The Cornwall Inn, a New England luxury hotel on the ocean that Phoebe had randomly found while browsing through a travel magazine at the fertility clinic years prior, back when she was still married and looking to splurge on a getaway with her then-husband Matt. She chose it because it's a place where no one knows who she is, and one where she imagined she would be happy. It also seems to her that is as good a place as any in which to kill herself.
When she arrives at the Cornwall, she finds herself in a lobby bustling with activity, and with people who all seemingly know each other. The Cornwall, it turns out, has been booked for the next six days to host the wedding festivities of a wealthy bride-to-be Lila and her soon-to-be-husband Gary. Phoebe's is the only non-wedding room, a likely mistake, but one the hotel honors. After checking in, she finds herself riding up in the elevator with Lila the bride, where Phoebe confesses that a) she's not there for the wedding, and b) she is there to kill herself. Lila's upset by the revelations, not because Phoebe is planning to take her own life, but because that act will "ruin her wedding". "How could you do this to me?" the bride asks—she's that sort of self-centered and entitled.
Circumstances are such that Phoebe does not end up killing herself as planned, and against all odds she finds herself forming an unlikely friendship with Lila the bride as well as several others in the wedding party. It's an unexpected turn of events, to say the least, but one that surprisingly feels natural despite the absurdity of the situation. As the week goes on, Phoebe gradually starts to embrace her second chance on life, approaching her interactions with "the wedding people" with an openness that is freeing and a new zero-fucks-given approach to her life.
The novel follows Phoebe's arc, with some flashbacks to how she descended to a point where she was ready to kill herself (and very nearly succeeded), through her ascension to a place of rebuilt strength. There's emotional heft to the story, of course, and not only with Phoebe. Gary is a widower and a father, and he and his 11-year-old daughter are still trying to put the pieces of their lives back together even as the wedding date swiftly approaches.
At one point, Phoebe is thinking about a crab shack that had been destroyed by hurricanes on multiple occasions:
Phoebe imagines that rebuilding after each devastation must be a real chore, especially for a place like Flo's, which has knickknacks covering every inch of the walls. To rebuild each time with the same level of bursting, idiosyncratic personality—how do you do that? How do you remember where each rusty spoon was nailed to the wall? How do you care where each bottle opener hangs when you put it up the fourth time? How do you act like this singular and quirky existence is entirely natural and will never be destroyed again?
Of course, one could draw a parallel between the restaurant rebuild and Phoebe (and Gary, and his daughter) attempting similar reconstructions of their lives, and that's mostly what the novel is about. How do you get up and continue going when you've hit bottom? What's the right way to go about it? And how brave must you be to power past the possibility of another heartache?
This is more than a melancholy look at dealing with tragedy, though. In fact, it's more focused on finding happiness than wallowing in the misery brought on by heartache. In conjunction with the theme of starting over, there's bits of humor and even some romance, and Espach plumbs the depths of the head vs. heart question when it comes to matters of love. All of this plays out among a cast of characters engaged in some of the most authentically written dialogue that I read this year.
While The Wedding People has popped up on several "best of" lists for 2024, I had middling expectations—this is not really the type of novel that I'm generally keen on—but I found myself fully enjoying the story and characters. It steps to the edge of tragedy, takes a brief glance, but then pulls back and focuses its energy on the pathways to finding happiness and moving forward. I was impressed with its thoughtfulness and completeness paired with its believable dialogue and well-rendered characters, and as a result, it is perhaps the most unexpected 5-star book of 2024 for me. Definitely worth reading.
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