A review by emilyinherhead
The Wedding People by Alison Espach

5.0

This story is about Phoebe, an adjunct English professor in her early 40s, whose husband has an affair with (and then leaves her for) their mutual friend and coworker. Alone and adrift, Phoebe decides to splurge on a night at a fancy waterfront hotel, with the intention of going to sleep in a giant comfy bed and never waking up. However! When she arrives to check in, she realizes that she is the only guest at the hotel who isn’t part of the wedding festivities taking place there all week; she then meets the bride-to-be in the elevator and almost immediately finds herself tangled up in the wedding people’s chaos.

In less capable hands this premise might have gone in a corny Hallmark direction, but Alison Espach really pulls it off. As she’s becoming more and more involved in the lead-up to these strangers’ wedding, Phoebe is also going deep into her own internal shit and figuring out what to do and how to live moving forward. The sense of freedom she slowly discovers as she wrestles with herself is so inspiring and exciting.

How much of her life had she spent in this moment, waiting for someone else to decide something conclusive about her? (28)

Maybe this is just what it means to be a person. To constantly reckon with being a single being in one body. (170)

At the same time as it’s tackling the heavy subject of, you know, human existence, the book is also funny and ridiculous and completely absorbing. When I picked up my phone somewhere along the way to jot something down, I saw that more than an hour had passed uninterrupted without my realizing—the sign of a truly excellent reading experience.