The Wedding People
The Wedding People
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Alison Espach on The Wedding People
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A breezy book that refused to stay breezyEspach was deep in drafting her second novel, ‘Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance’, a book drawn directly from the death of her brother when they were both teenagers. By the time she reached a breaking point with that material, her solution was to swing as far as possible in the opposite direction.
I really needed a break from that book. I thought it was getting a little heavy, a little dark. I was writing about death at the time. So I was like, you know what, why am I doing this to myself? Why don’t I write a fun book, a breezy book, a woman going on vacation, going to this very luxurious hotel.
The escape lasted about one scene. When Espach wrote the moment where Lila, the bride, keeps pressing the mysterious stranger for a reason she is at the hotel, Espach cycled through several explanations before one stopped her cold. The answer she typed wasn’t what she planned, and it told her something she didn’t want to know about the book she was actually writing.
I ended up writing, ‘I’m here to end my life.’ And that really surprised me and disappointed me at the time. Because it was like, Oh, she’s sad. She’s a very sad woman walking into this hotel and that’s at odds with the happiness that the bride demands.
She recognized the line as the right one immediately, then put the draft away for two years.
Before she was a novelist, Espach worked her way through graduate school as a photo booth attendant at weddings for a rental company. The company told employees to dress for the occasion rather than wear uniforms, which meant she spent each event looking like the most unhappy guest in the room, standing alone beside a machine with no stake in the social world around her. That position turned out to be exactly the angle the book needed.
I spent a lot of time working many weddings, where I looked on as a total stranger. Sometimes people talked to me, and I got a very honest look into the wedding. I wanted that perspective to be the guiding perspective of this book — the stranger’s.
When she returned to the draft years later, she found that the internal voice that had told her not to write something so dark wasn’t just resistance. It had a name, and it was already in the manuscript.
When I came back to the novel, after abandoning it for a few years, I realized that was actually my voice. People always think I’m Phoebe, but in some ways, I’m also Lila, right? That self-policing of sadness, saying, you can’t be sad now, or you can’t write a sad book.
Naming the pattern in herself freed her to let Phoebe, the novel’s suicidal stranger who blunders into a Newport wedding, own her despair without apology.
How she wrote it
Zooming in, staying uncertain, staying honestEspach has said she finds conventional character sketches paralyzing. Rather than building a profile from physical detail and backstory, she starts with one emotional fact and follows it. Lila, Phoebe’s opposite in almost every way, grew out of exactly that method: once Phoebe arrived as a woman in despair, her counterpart had to be someone whose entire orientation was to refuse despair with equal force.
I’ve always had trouble with those character sketches that sometimes you get in creative writing classes. I don’t know if they have a tattoo, or how old they are, or where they went to high school. I would get overwhelmed by all those details, and really found that what works for me is just, ‘I don’t know, but I know that this person is sad beyond belief, and I’m just going to see what that opens up for me.’
‘The Wedding People’ is her only novel in third person. The shift wasn’t stylistic experimentation; it was a structural solution to a specific danger she could see coming from the material.
Writing a character like Phoebe, one of my fears was the reader feeling stuck in her mind and in her despair. I wanted to be able to step back and sometimes just look at her with a little distance. So almost zooming in and zooming out with third person was something I was very interested in with this particular book.
She resists outlining, and she is deliberate about that resistance. The choice isn’t laziness or distrust of structure; it’s a theory about where a novelist’s energy comes from over the long haul of drafting.
As a writer, especially a writer of a novel, you need questions like fuel to keep you interested [in writing], the same way you want to be wondering things when you’re reading a good book, the same way you want to be wondering things when you’re watching a great movie. So I’m the kind of writer who doesn’t overly outline for that reason. I need to keep some of the mystery alive. Otherwise, I will just put it down.
She stopped writing for months at a stretch because she didn’t want to inhabit Phoebe’s darkest interior. The fear wasn’t abstract discomfort with dark material; it was the worry that readers would read intimate knowledge of despair as personal confession. She eventually recognized that avoidance as the same pattern she’d built into Lila.
My goal as a fiction writer is to always be as honest as possible. It’s often what I appreciate most when I’m reading other people’s fiction. That’s always my goal, and that is always my greatest challenge.
Newport, Rhode Island, where the novel is set, wasn’t chosen for atmosphere alone. Espach had a research grant from Providence College to stay at a luxury hotel and experience the setting she’d been writing fraudulently from the outside. The city’s relationship to its own beauty turned out to mirror the book’s central preoccupation.
Newport is a beautiful and historic place that invests a lot of time, money and energy into being beautiful and historic — an effort that reminds me of the time, money and energy that people spend trying to make a wedding absolutely perfect. I had fun playing with the ways that both the wedding and Newport aren’t exactly what they try to be — when the cracks in the façade begin to show.
The personal thread
Grief as the water she swims inThe grief distributed through the novel across multiple characters, including Phoebe, Gary, Lila, and Gary’s daughter, isn’t a theme Espach chose so much as a default she carries. Her second novel drew directly from the death of her brother when they were both teenagers, and the aftermath of that loss shapes what she assumes about the people around her.
I think maybe because of the way I grew up, I just assume everybody is secretly grieving something in their own private way as they walk about and try to be a person.
She doesn’t experience humor and grief as competing tones that require careful balancing. The comic energy of the book, particularly in scenes where Phoebe’s despair collides with the wedding’s mandatory cheerfulness, comes directly from a pattern she recognizes in her own life.
I think the darkness of the grief is exactly what produces the humor. When I look back at my life, it’s the incongruity of certain moments that have made me laugh—the intensity of what I’m feeling in contrast with the indifference of my surroundings.
By the time she finished the novel, she had been writing seriously for long enough to know the difference between working something out on the page and working with confidence. The first two books were a different kind of effort.
With my first two books, I was working through some of the big questions of my writing life... By the time I got to The Wedding People, I was confident in what I was doing. I made deliberate choices and stuck with them — and confidently said goodbye to all the other versions of this book that could exist.
What she wants us to sit with
Small honest moments as rehearsalEspach has said in the Barnes & Noble book club conversation that she hoped readers would put the book down and practice saying what they actually wanted, because small honest moments build toward larger ones. The formal version of that hope is sharper.
I hope the book inspires readers to ask themselves whether they are living out their own desires or someone else’s. It’s not an easy question to find answers to, but it’s a question that has enriched my own life since I started asking it.
The wedding people in the novel don’t rescue Phoebe through any single dramatic act. They keep appearing, needing things from her, confessing things they haven’t told anyone else. What Espach wanted to show was a very specific mechanism of recovery: not transformation, but the gradual reattachment to ordinary life through small interruptions.
I wanted to put Phoebe in a position where other people could help spark something in her, reveal to her other possible doors, ones she had never imagined before.
In the Rachel Barenbaum interview, Espach addressed the question of how humor survives grief in fiction, and the answer she gave wasn’t a theory about craft balance.
Espach said that humor isn’t a choice for her — it’s simply there, inseparable from tragedy, and the two feed each other life. [paraphrased from audio]
For a book that opens with a woman checking into a hotel to die, that’s the clearest statement of what Espach believes fiction can do: not explain grief away, but make it livable by refusing to keep it separate from everything else.