The Wedding People by Alison Espach

It's funny how time changes you as a reader. This is a book that, had I brought it on vacation even 5 years ago, I would have DEFINITELY thrown across the room and then put on indefinite pause within the first 25 pages. The description sounded fascinating -- a woman has left her tattered life behind and flown from Missouri to Rhode Island to a fancy hotel she has always wanted to go to but couldn't afford, because she has decided to end her life. But wait! That sounds terrible! The premise is actually that she checks in at the hotel, and finds out through an administrative error she is the only person in the entire hotel who is not a part of a big, fancy, Wedding Week for a very Bridezilla bride (and groom). She gets absorbed into the wedding shenanigans and... well, read the book. 

It sounds dire. But it was actually laugh-out-loud funny as much as it was a completely accurate and wrenching depiction of the loss and grief when your life falls spectacularly apart and you don't know how to "do life" now that your life is upside down. 

I was so angry, though, at the immediate infertility subplot (that actually turned out to be central to the book, no "sub" about it), that I went to the description in Book of the Month, and felt like an idiot because when you scrolled down a bit further than I had, it clearly has a content warning for "infertility, depictions of attempted suicide, descriptions of miscarriage, divorce." I felt less mad after that, and once I really got into the book, I forgave it entirely. 

This book is INCREDIBLE. [What follows are not actually spoilers, if you can believe it...] I absolutely loved Phoebe, the main character who has lost absolutely everything -- she's done 5 IVF cycles, she got pregnant with her last embryo only to miscarry at 10 weeks, she has an academic career as an adjunct professor of 19th century literature that's stalled out, her husband has left her, and she's lost her beloved cat. 

The descriptions of doing IVF and failing at it (or IVF failing you, to be kinder) are SPOT ON. 

A couple notable IVF quotes (chosen for no spoiler-ism): 

"Maybe I just need to accept that my life is a Russian novel. ... I just mean, a story can be beautiful not because of the way it ends. But because of the way it's written." [I love that SO MUCH.]

"For years she had been thinking about was what she should put in her body to make it a super womb, and she was tired of it. Fuck my body, she thought, but did not say it." [Relate, relate, relate... I had major fuckit-itis when we were done, too]

A couple notable funny quotes (chosen for no spoiler-ism): 

"Everyone at the gallery walks around like, Oh, my, look at this white canvas. Look at what this painter has done with all this white space. He has chosen not to paint it! He has defied the conventions of painting by not actually painting! Isn't that bold? Doesn't that make you want to pay thousands of dollars for it? And some people are like, Yes, yes, it does, actually." 

"...and then she goes off about how I might want to think twice about marrying an older man in waste management like she did."  "I thought Gary was a doctor?" "My father owned landfills. Gary is a gastroenterologist. Totally different jobs, but my mother is just like, Like I said, they're both in waste management. Two men, on a mission to help the country deal with their shit." 

Funny AND IVF related: 

"Technically, they're called retrievals. But they should be called Egg-stractions, right? I mean, come on. It's just sitting right there." 

This was a book that when it was over, I was sad not to exist with the people in it anymore. The characters were amazing. AND, the book was very satisfying. It didn't have a trite ending. It didn't make me mad at the end at all. I loved the message of it. I loved that it was serious content matter, but also seriously funny. Laugh-out-loud funny, disturb Bryce while he's reading a very serious math book kind of laughing. (On that note, I had a very embarrassing moment at breakfast in the inn we're at in Maine where we walked in to get coffee with our books, and a lady said, "that's some serious summer vacation reading material," and like a total dingdong I held up The Wedding People and said, "oh yes, this one?" and she looked confused and said, "ummm no, THAT one" pointing at Bryce's book, which is, sigh, this one:)

Clearly, obviously, the more "serious" book

Really, I loved everything about The Wedding People, except for the brief moment when I felt sneak-attacked and then realized I just hadn't read all the information given when I picked it. And then I loved it more for how it handled all the things infertility, loss, and involuntary childlessness.