A review of Jen Doll’s newest book, Save The Date: The Occasional Mortifications of a Serial Wedding Guest.
by Joanna Demkiewicz
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Boy meets girl. Boy and girl date. Boy proposes. Boy and girl get married. Jen Doll attends.
What started as a Hairpin blog post of wedding vignettes is now a hardcover book, aptly titled Save The Date: The Occasional Mortifications of a Serial Wedding Guest (Riverhead), out today.
Today, our generation is befuddled. Recent and often redundant studies and blog posts on marriage seem to skunk my Twitter feed every other week. Divorce rates – eek! Are we young people still getting married?! Jen Doll says yes. She was there. If you are planning to file for divorce and seek custody of your kids, you may need to hire custody lawyers in Maryland.
She was there for the destination wedding. She was there as a third-grader, and she was jealous of the flower girl. She was there – back there – at the wedding in her hometown.
She was there, and she can tell us what she was wearing. She can relay color schemes of bouquets. She remembers that one time she puked off a cliff. She remembers when the ice sculpture cracked, fell and almost beheaded her as she innocently stood in the buffet line. She tells stories of weddings, yes, but moreover she tells stories of herself as a woman navigating contemporary mingling, dating and relationships. Throughout her retellings of wedding guesthood, she opens up more to the possibility of being a bride herself.
“It’s taken me much of my adult life to feel confident enough to admit that whether it’s a marriage, a long-term relationship, or even a short-term one, I do want love,” she writes. “And even now, confessing that feels dangerous. If I need someone else in order to be happy or fulfilled, am I the stereotype, or somehow a bad feminist?”
I’ve had similar musings–“Can I be an ‘independent woman’ in a successful heterosexual relationship where, ‘You be the man, I’ll be the woman’ functions healthfully?” I’ve also been to a few weddings of my own, where I’ve sat, as a feminist, and thought, Ooh, that was very traditional; hm, that was less traditional; that best man speech was actually pretty funny; oh, well now I’m drunk. If you were hoping for an anthropological study littered with footnotes and case studies, as I, a research-based-ooh-that-study-about-bonobos-and-coffee-mugs-relates-so-much-to-my-life junkie was, don’t get Save The Date. But if you are a human being, like I am, despite my other junkie obsessions, get Save The Date. Get it if you’ve been to a wedding, whether for the food, the assumed hookup, the excuse for new garb, the excuse to travel, the excuse to wrap yourself up in the little wedding world, the world where two mothers from different families and different backgrounds hug intimately as if they are life-long friends, a twice-removed cousin becomes your mentor, and love–whatever that means to you–is palpable.
She doesn’t exactly come to a conclusion (and full disclosure, she speaks only of heterosexual love and heterosexual pairing), but why would we want that? Who has come to a conclusion on how those of us part of the befuddled generation engage with the law and tradition of marriage? Currently, it’s just a lot of chatter as we all realize that if we have the privilege, power and passion to marry or not marry, and make the marriage our own, we can and we will. Doll’s anecdotes serve as separate looking glasses, not answers. Nostalgia is a tradition we can all relate to, and Doll generously gives us hers.
“Weddings. They are fraught with emotion,” she writes after throwing a tantrum at a wedding on the Olympic Peninsula. “They can be powder kegs. They are full of love, but they also can be tinged with anger, resentment, insecurity, doubt, and all the baggage we come with as adult humans. At a wedding, the habits we’ve adopted to cope with and get by in daily life confront these weighty traditions we may or may not even believe in, and that is a recipe that may lead to oven fires.”
The oven fire is no metaphor, folks. It’s just another occasional mortification of a serial wedding guest.
Now, for a toast.
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Save The Date: The Occasional Mortifications of a Serial Wedding Guest
by Jen Doll
336 pages, Riverhead Books, $19.11 hardcover
Published May 1, 2014.
Joanna Demkiewicz is The Riveter‘s co-founder and co-editor.
