People of a certain age who grew up in Chicago will remember what seemed like a ubiquitous television commercial for a musical no one would remember, where a woman comes out of the theater, is apparently confronted by a person with a camera asking how she liked the show and she replies, “I laughed, I cried, it was better than ‘Cats.’” This is how I felt about Alison Espach’s new novel, “The Wedding People,” completely sincerely, no irony intended. Espach is now three for three on delivering funny, emotionally moving explorations of the difficulties people have in being themselves.
Her sharp, coming-of-age novel debut, “The Adults,” presaged the even more accomplished follow-up, “Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance.” Now we have “The Wedding People.” In all three novels, Espach’s focal characters are experiencing a kind of disorienting and distorting sadness that seems to be the dominant feature of their lives.
In “Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance,” main character Sally is dealing with a sudden tragic loss when she is a teenager that looms over her life well into adulthood. By framing the novel as a direct address from Sally to the person she has lost, we understand that Sally is both desperately sad but also utterly alive, with a cutting wit and big but sometimes inaccessible heart. It was one of my favorite books of 2022.
“The Wedding People” focuses on Phoebe Stone, a divorced adjunct English professor from St. Louis who recently found h.