Reading wedding messages inspired my new book (exclusive)

My love affair with wedding started at the breakfast table in our Connecticut home. The style section in New York Times Be a must-read on Sunday mornings due to commitment and wedding messages. One of my four sisters would grab the paper and read these gems aloud, in a proclamation vote with special intonation for each name drop in an Ivy League or Seven Sisters School. Particular attention was paid to brides or grooms with surnames as a first name.

This was in the 1970s then Times Parade couples based on their current social status, their educational trunk and their approximate relationship with Hamilton Fish, a New York Statman who served as governor, Senator and Secretary of State and who seemed to have an endless range of relatives who lifted a hundred years after his political heyday. We did not know these people, at least not most of them, but we carefully cared for the birthplace of their grandparents. Reading wedding messages became a lifetime swan.

Wedding fever rattled when my oldest sister Julie married under a green-white striped tent in our garden. Months before the event, my mother went to Defcon 1. In addition to house painting and re -caping, she would instruct us not to move the walls or use the front door until after the wedding. As a 13 -year -old, I was a bridesmaid and came home from summer camp in Rainy Maine just before the big day, pale and covered with mosquito bites.

My mom threw a bunch of Laura Ashley dresses at me for a variety of festivities and told me not to eat anything in the fridge because everything was “for the wedding.” The week before, my brother and I had to look up a tent in the garden to sleep because our bedrooms had been turned into the staging of areas for the restaurant. The wedding went without any problems, a wonderful event on a wonderful August day. Over the next 40 years, on all blue sky Saturday, my mom would look up, take in the weather and explain: “Today is a good day for a wedding.”

Despite my interest in other people’s weddings, my own was a low business. The only vision I had for myself was to go down in the hallway with my two bridesmaids in matching white suits as a Modern Music video. Since the year was 1993 and I wanted something fresh. My mom hanged me on our only wedding shopping trip. I tried on a Bedazzled white suit with huge shoulder pads and looked like Crystal Carrington Cosplay. A look in the mirror and we both started laughing so hard, I thought Neiman Marcus would throw us out. On the way to the exit we passed a small tribal show with a new design team, Misschka. At the end of the rolling stand was a short lace casing wedding dress with large Grosgrrain bows on the cuffs of my size. Magic is available.

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In the past year I have worked with a novel called Abigail and Alexa save the wedding. It is the story of the months up to the big day, as I said by the bride’s mother and groom, two women who have nothing in common except that their adult children want to spend the rest of their lives together. Questions arise between the committed couple, and the mothers must find a way to work together to save the wedding. Writing demanded me to immerse myself in the wedding-industrial complex, where that aesthetics threatens to take over the intention.

For research I have spent countless hours watching Say yes to the dressStudy label columns on bridal parties and comb through social media posts of dogs in floral kronor, choreographed bridal party inputs and trendy monk walls. (Please, only serve cake.) It seems that nothing is simple anymore.

Everything wedding is programmed, monogramed or instagrammed. The pictures are spectacular, but all research made me realize that for me the hook was never hoopla. It was always love, a lesson that I handed over to my main characters.

2017, New York Times Launched the Vows episode, an updated grip on traditional wedding messages, with smaller CVs quoting and more stories about how the couple met, requested and overcome stumbles through love and commitment. There are still plenty of country clubs Ivy Leaguers on the pages, but also teachers, social workers and musicians. Hello, gay couples, other weddings and city hall ceremonies as well. Love is love is love, after all.

I will admit that I miss hearing about Hamilton Fish’s relatives and hope they are doing well. But I love to read the stories about couples in all the stripes that take the leap and I am not alone. Books on fictional weddings also fly from the shelves in the bookstores. Why? To commit themselves to another person while family, friends and furry attendants act as witnesses to your trade union is an act of faith in the future. And it lifts us all.

I guess that’s why I still read the announcements with complete strangers with such joy. As my mother would say, “Today is a good day for a wedding.”

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Abigail and Alexa save the wedding Is for sale now, wherever books are sold.