My love affair with weddings started at the breakfast table of our Connecticut home. The Style section of the New York Times was a must-read on Sunday mornings because of the engagement and wedding announcements. One of my four sisters would grab the paper and read these gems out loud, in a proclamation voice with special intonation for any name-drop of an Ivy League or Seven Sisters school. Special attention was paid to brides or grooms with last names as first names.
This was in the 1970’s when the Times featured couples based on their current social status, their educational pedigree and their approximate relationship to Hamilton Fish, a New York statesman who served as governor, senator and secretary of state and who seemed to have an endless supply of relatives getting hitched a hundred years after his political heyday. We didn’t know these people, at least not most of them, but we cared deeply about the birthplace of their great-grandparents. Reading the wedding announcements became a lifetime habit.
Wedding fever ratcheted up when my oldest sister Julie got married under a green-and-white-striped tent in our front yard. Months before the event, my mother went to DEFCON 1. In addition to house painting and re-landscaping, she would instruct us not to touch the walls or use the front door until after the wedding. At 13, I was a bridesmaid and arrived home from summer camp in rainy Maine shortly before the big day, pale and covered in mosquito bites.
My mother tossed a bunch of Laura Ashley dresses at me for a variety of festivities and told me not to eat anything in the refrigerator because all of it was “for the wedding.” The week before, my brother and I had to pitch a tent in the back yard for sleeping because our bedrooms had been turned into staging areas for the caterer. The wedding went off without a hitch, a glorious event on a glorious August day. For the next 40 years, on any blue-sky Saturday, my mother would look up, take in the weather and declare, ‘Today’s a good day for a wedding.”
Despite my interest in other people’s weddings, my own was a low-key affair. The only vision I had for myself was walking down the aisle with my two bridesmaids in matching white suits like an En Vogue music video. Because the year was 1993 and I wanted something fresh. My mother indulged me on our one and only wedding shopping trip. I tried on a bedazzled white suit with enormous shoulder pads and looked like Crystal Carrington cosplay. One look in the mirror and we both started laughing so hard, I thought Neiman Marcus was going to throw us out. On our way to the exit, we passed a small trunk show featuring a newish design team, Badgley Mischka. At the end of the rolling rack was a short lace sheath wedding dress with big grosgrain bows on the cuffs in my size. Magic does exist.
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Over the last year, I’ve been working on a novel called Abigail and Alexa Save the Wedding. It’s the story of the months leading up to the big day as told by the mother of the bride and the mother of the groom, two women who have nothing in common except the fact that their adult children want to spend the rest of their lives together. Issues arise between the engaged couple, and the mothers must find a way to work together to save the wedding. The writing required me to immerse myself in the wedding-industrial complex, where the aesthetic threatens to overtake the intention.
For research, I’ve spent countless hours watching Say Yes to the Dress, studying etiquette columns about bridal party issues and combing through social media posts of canines in floral crowns, choreographed bridal party entrances and trendy donut walls. (Please, just serve cake.) It seems nothing is simple anymore.
Everything wedding-adjacent is programmed, monogrammed or Instagrammed. The images are spectacular, but all the research made me realize that, for me, the hook was never the hoopla. It was always the love, a lesson I passed onto my main characters.
In 2017, the New York Times launched the Vows section, an updated take on traditional wedding announcements, featuring less resume citing and more storytelling about how the couple met, courted and overcame stumbling blocks through love and commitment. There are still plenty of country-clubbing Ivy Leaguers in the pages, but also teachers, social workers and musicians. Hello, gay couples, second weddings and city hall ceremonies, too. Love is Love is Love, after all.
I’ll admit, I miss hearing about Hamilton Fish’s relatives and hope they’re doing well. But I adore reading the stories of couples of all stripes who take the leap and I’m not alone. Books about fictional weddings fly off the shelves of bookstores, too. Why? Because committing to another person while family, friends and furry attendants act as witnesses to your union is an act of faith in the future. And that uplifts us all.
I guess that’s why I still read the announcements of complete strangers with such delight. As my mother would say, “Today is a good day for a wedding. “
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Abigail and Alexa Save the Wedding is on sale now, wherever books are sold.
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