Insider tragi-comic secrets from a wedding planner - Alison Espach gifts us the jewels of nuptial hope and despair with alarming accuracy

For readers who haven’t (yet!) read ‘The Wedding People’ can you tell us about it in one sentence?The novel is about a woman who thinks she's at the end of her life, but unexpectedly learns how to start her life over at a stranger's wedding. 

Have you been to many weddings and what qualities do you dread and love about them?I used to work at weddings, so I've been to a lot of them. This book is primarily drawn from the experience of always being the total stranger at some random person’s wedding. That might sound like a nightmare to some people, but I loved it. I got to have all the weird conversations with the lonely guests who were not having a particularly good time and needed a stranger to talk to about it. Usually what they were complaining about was that they couldn’t be honest with their friends and families about their lives—which I think is the worst part of the wedding for the guest—the pressure to always act like everything is amazing and wonderful. But the best parts are the speeches—even as a total stranger I found myself crying during them.

We love how you have blended romance, social satire, and situational humour with tragedy and hope – what inspired you to use a wedding as a setting for your novel?A wedding is such an expensive, high-stakes performance of happiness and love, and I couldn’t think of something a bride might dread more than another woman coming in and being honest about all her despair and isolation. The tension between how you are really feeling and how you are supposed to be feeling is so palpable at a wedding, and wherever that tension is, I find things are equally hilarious as they are tragic.

Which witty novel inspired you the most growing up?

I really loved Melissa Banks’ The Girl’s Guide to Hunting and Fishing. I read that as a young teenager, and I don’t think I could have articulated it at the time, but I knew that’s the kind of thing I wanted to grow up and try to write.

Where do you write? Do you need silence, crave music or manage with people drilling outside your window/other? Any writing habits gratefully received.

I often write on my couch or bed. I used to be able to write with music and chaos around me, but I’ve lost that ability. I need to create a kind of isolation chamber that is as humanly comfortable as possible, or I’ll start to get distracted. Not the most romantic vision of writing—I deeply long to be a café writer or someone who can sit under a tree, but a las.

Finally, can you tell us why you think CWIP is important?

Women are so hilarious and my sense of humour has been shaped by them. And yet there are still some people who think women aren’t that funny or that a funny woman should be taken less seriously -- I couldn’t disagree more. It’s really amazing that the CWIP is honouring those women who take the risk of trying to be funny in a world that doesn’t always encourage that. Comedy requires a lot of courage, I think.

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