The Wedding People by Alison Espach is a delightful suicide-meets-wedding story that delves into the exhaustion of women through the perspective of a 28yo bride and a 40yo academic. Phoebe is smart, depressed, sarcastic, trapped in her own life – and for the first time dares to start speaking some truths, which leads her down a road of discovery that changes her life forever.
Depression and grief are central to the story, as we follow Phoebe’s struggles with a failed marriage, infertility, and the death of her beloved cat. The story treats grief, not as a permanent state, but as something that can evolve and inform new beginnings, which I absolutely loved.
The also story critiques the pursuit of perfect, flawless events, showing how such ideals can lead to failure and emotional distress. Lila’s meticulously planned wedding serves as a facade masking deeper unhappiness and strained relationships. Like Phoebe says in the end, all weddings are a waste.
I’m afraid all women turn into Phoebe sooner or later.
We’re told we need to care-take and kin-keep even to our own detriment. Pushed down by overwhelming expectations we become complicit in our own subjugation – we stop seeing our value, are drawn into self-suffocation, grieve all the talents we never explored, get stuck in the routine of life where we never talk about our honest opinions because we’re so busy putting the needs of others first.
Despite being smart and interesting, Phoebe’s stuck in her own life like a hamster on a wheel, counting her steps as they lead her only further into depression, hopelessness and a place where desire goes to die. The logical conclusion is to kill herself – which is what she’s at the hotel to do. But the week-long wedding that’s taking place at the hotel she’s chose as her final destination serves as an intervention and gives Phoebe a chance to find out who she really is.
Because once you’ve decided to let it all go, what do you have left to lose? You can go around being brutally honest with people – with yourself – and the world doesn’t come to an end. People even find the real you charming and interesting.
The budding romance does play a part in Phoebe’s story as she spends a week unravelling herself from her previous marriage, but the absolute star of the show is the relationship between Phoebe and Lila (the bridezilla).
Love interest Gary and his family serve more as a reminder of what it feels like to belong somewhere, not just to exist. Phoebe spends her week getting to know the people involved — not just on a surface level but on a more existential one — and she’s able to do this precisely because she finds herself at a place where she has passed through the veil and into something new.
Her newfound brutal honesty is helping her achieve the kind of clarity we spend our 20s and much of our 30s wishing for. And saying how she really feels (for the first time in her life) is actually connecting her to people rather than pushing them away.
Phoebe has complex PTSD to deal with and the inner work she’s been quietly doing for four decades is finally coming to a head, enough is enough. And I love the intentionality in Phoebe’s decision that if she is to live, she is going to LIVE, not just exist. This opens her up to all kinds of things that would have been unimaginable to her a week ago.
And I love that the book doesn’t position romance, falling in love, or having a relationship as some magical fix to all the problems in your life. Love, above all else, and connection is what brings us back to our own humanity, and it’s the love of family, love of friends, the love that you are able to give and receive that will change your life irrevocably.
The healing and personal growth unfold gradually for everyone, not just Phoebe, but Phoebe serves as a kind of catalyst, a mirror, to the rest of the characters — her newfound honesty lets everyone else see the truth about themselves as well. Quiet, incremental progress constitutes real recovery, rejecting that classic romantic resolution (so common in the romance genre) in favour of authentic transformation.
It’s really all about the women.
How women are pushed into tiny little boxes built out of expectations, how grief warps your perception of daily life and drives you into some strange places, how exhaustion slowly drags you down into the depths with it and morphs into depression when you spend an entire life denying yourself the air you need to breathe.
And who can blame us? Life is exhausting, especially when it doesn’t really go how you’d hoped. Having recently had a miscarriage, reading this book – how it sums up the trying to get pregnant (tho I never did IVF but still relatable af), being pregnant and then the gaping terror that is losing a pregnancy. Pain and getting beaten down by life would exhaust anyone, but then you’re told to just get up and smile more, no matter how much pain you’re in.
The ways women make themselves small is a significant thread throughout the story.
Through Phoebe and the other women in the story — Lila at the beginning of a new phase in her life, Wendy who is present through her absence, Juice caught between people who don’t see her pain and her own grief, Lila’s mother who’s been down that road before etc — each woman helps us examine motherhood, being a wife, the expectation of sacrifice, exploring how women navigate competing pressures and desires in their everyday lives… and what they end up regretting or learning.
The heart of the story is really how unexpected connections can change our lives forever.
The unlikely friendship between Phoebe and Lila demonstrates how strangers can provide exactly what we need in our darkest moments, when we’re open to it.
Despite the super heavy themes, it’s all balanced beautifully with humour and wit, creating something that is tender, funny and brutally honest at once. It’s a story about finding hope in life’s cracks and imperfections.
This was a beautifully cynical week I got to spend with these people, where Phoebe both becomes the voice of the feminine exhaustion that I recognise in myself and the vehicle for hope, showing us that there is an ✨after✨ (after death, after the wedding, after the marriage, after all the things you failed to do).
Life doesn’t end at failure. It begins when you decide to dust yourself off and do something else.
“When Sasha Barrett gets bitten by a snake on a mission, her squad captain’s quick actions not only save her life, but also make her realise something she may have known all along…“
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