One year after the release of ‘Save the Date: The Occasional Mortifications of a Serial Wedding Guest” Jen Doll celebrates the release of its paperback version, and reflects on how the book changed her life (it didn’t).
by Allison Prang
If you’re looking for a real-life Carrie Bradshaw type who lives in Brooklyn and will gladly meet you for cheeseburgers and wine, meet Jen Doll.
Doll is the author of Save the Date: the Mortifications of a Serial Wedding Guest, which comes out in paperback this month. It’s Doll’s first memoir — based off of a story she wrote for The Hairpin in 2012 — and is an outlet for sharing her tales of weddings over the course of her life that she’s been to, some in New York, others abroad; some of friends, some with old lovers.
Doll is a freelance writer in New York City and is also a contributing editor for Mental Floss. She’s written in the past for The New York Times Book Review, New York Magazine, Glamour, The Hairpin, The Village Voice and more about an entire bouquet of topics, from love and books to sexting, and of course, weddings. (She is also full of quippy tweets about her freelance life, love of cheese, and various book and band names she comes up with.
I talked to Doll about what it’s like a year after Save the Date first came out, memoir writing and more.
Allison Prang: It’s a year after Save the Date, your little baby, has been published. How do you feel a year out, now [that] it’s about to come out in paperback?
Jen Doll: “Well, I wrote it two years ago at this point because of the time it takes to get through the process of being published. So I kind of am starting to feel like, ‘Oh, crap, now…you really need to write another book…and get to work.’ But I feel like very proud…it’s been like quite a journey of experience with [the] first book, where everything is completely new and you have some expectations about what’s gonna happen, but most of them are wrong and you just kind of go through the whole thing, and you learn a lot…which has been great and it’s nice that it came out in hardcover and then…as a paperback… It’s like having a birthday party kind of…now it’s one.”
AP: Did you have a cake or anything?
JD: No. Although when the cover came out, Mom ordered a cake with the book on it…which was both the sweetest thing, and also like, “Oh my God, I feel like such a dork.” It was like, really really cute.”
AP: I hope if I ever publish a book, my mom gets me a cake. That’s a high bar.
JD: Yeah. It was really nice. I’m not married and I don’t have kids, so I think this was their moment to really celebrate…a milestone for me… so they were really, really excited and proud, which is adorable.
AP: After the book was done and you knew you couldn’t change it anymore, did you find yourself thinking you should’ve added that one [additional]anecdote or were you nervous having written about one person?
JD: Yeah…there’s one person who is unfortunately no longer a friend, but I felt like it was a really important part of the book… there will be inevitably be some situations where you’re not completely on board with the person that your friend is marrying, and I wrote about that because I just think its such a common experience… but I was 28, and I kinda freaked out and I didn’t support this situation… and I needed to write about it in a way that seemed fair to both of us, but I was really scared that she would be hurt by it. With everyone I wrote about, [I ended up] either talking to them or alerting them, or, like a lot of the brides read early drafts of chapters…I was making sure everything was accurate and OK. Anyway, it was very scary for that to come out but she had forewarning … at some point, you just let yourself go because that’s the story you need to tell and you believe in it.
AP: Those are the types of real stories that people would relate to. A memoir’s not going to be this fluffy thing that’s very easy, otherwise it’s not interesting.
JD: Right. I also think its interesting because there’s sort of this veil upon weddings in which we’re supposed to pretend like everything is perfect and wonderful, but similarly to writing a book, your life doesn’t change completely because you get married. The same issues in relationships that exist before [exist] after, and you have to keep working on all the relationships you have if you consider them valuable and you want to keep them, so I wanted to pull back that veil a little bit and show what really happens. Wedding guests have their own perspectives as they go into these different events, and it changes whether you’re eight or 28 or 35.
AP: In choosing to write a book about weddings, were you doing that because you had all those experiences or did you want people to learn something about weddings specifically?
JD: I guess it’s a combination. This was something that I had found myself thinking about for a long time and I felt like I did have a lot of different experiences. It’s not like I wrote the memoir to be like, ‘I have lessons for you,’ readers. It was more like, this is something I experienced and felt a lot of things about and wanted to write about. It felt like fodder for a lot of exploration both for me personally and for a lot of people [who] have had similar experiences and maybe would appreciate or feel sort of that this would resonate with them, too. I didn’t really see that there was a book like this out in the world, especially as our views about marriage change. In American society, we [get married] later and sometimes you don’t get married at all; what does it mean to keep going to these weddings — in a way an archaic tradition — but we bring a lot of modern views to it, like marrying for love and…wanting to find soul mates.
AP: That anecdote with the friend who [you] said you guys are no longer friends, obviously that was something super personal to write about…do you find it hard to be that in touch with your feelings and really understand them enough to write about them?
JD: I was writing it when I was like 35 or 36. I’m still not always in touch with my feelings, and I’m still doing stupid shit all the time and learning. I also felt like weddings are this very interesting, almost photographic or cinematic moment and your experience, your feelings are heightened as you go to these things and you remember them…because often they are photographed and it’s so vivid. I didn’t feel like it was hard to bring back those memories necessarily, but there was some sense of like, it’s hard to write about myself as a stupid — not like 28-year- olds are stupid —but I was sometimes a stupid 28-year-old and did bad things and it’s kinda hard to reflect on that stuff and try to get the balance right. Responses to the book have been like, ‘You’re so badly behaved,’ and ‘You… have a drinking problem’ and it’s like, “Well guys, I was writing about a self that existed, you know, 10 years ago …at the same time I still have those parts of me and I don’t always behave properly. So, I don’t know…it’s interesting to turn the lens on yourself and try to be honest and really share the stuff that I’ve learned about myself, because I feel like maybe other people will feel this way too, and then sometimes people will just take that honesty and throw it back at you and say, “You have this problem,” and you’re like, ‘Yeah, I know… I told you.’
AP: And that’s what all memoirs are about though, right? Being honest? Is that the hardest thing that comes with them, would you say?
JD: I think that at the time, writing this first one, the beauty of your first, is that you don’t really have any idea…I would like to write another memoir, but I also want to put some space between this one and (the next)…because I know the kind of reactions that can come, and I wanna make sure that whatever I’m writing about next is something I truly believe in and I hope to cope with whatever — if there’s negative reaction about it, that’s fine because this was something I thought was meaningful. The worst thing in the world would be to write a memoir that you didn’t really believe.
AP: You mentioned how you wanted space between Save the Date and writing another memoir, [but] you do have a fun book project that you’re working on, don’t you? Is there anything you can tell us?
JD: I’m working on a Y.A. novel, but it’s only about halfway done. I have this idea for another novel that I have about 30 pages of, and [it’s] kind of all over the place, so, too early to say what’s going to happen, but I am working on stuff.
AP: Two new books though, that’s pretty big. In picturing the Jen Doll life, you live in Brooklyn, you’re a freelance writer for all these fun places, you drink wine and you have a book.
JD: I have a really, really tiny apartment that I like to work in wearing my pajamas most of the time, and I have other projects where sometimes I go into offices and I write for magazines and websites. If you go from before the book came out to now, I feel really grateful and excited that I have just continued to craft a life that’s what I want to live creatively and with a flexible sort of schedule and different projects that I find interesting, a variety of them. At the same time, you’re constantly thinking, “I’m not working hard enough, I’m not doing enough, I’m descending into oblivion and no one’s gonna know what I’m doing, and no one’s gonna care.” But I was reminded recently by someone very smart that editors want good writing, so ideally, if I can write well …I can keep my life as it is.
AP: If you had to give any advice about writing a memoir…what would it be?
JD: Write the book that you really want to write, and maybe the book that you would want to read. And write something that you really believe in…don’t try to fit a certain zeitgeist or a certain trend. Don’t think of it that way. Think of it much more organically, about you and the story that you need and want to tell.
Allison Prang is a reporter for The Post and Courier in Charleston, South Carolina, where she writes about tech and tourism. She’s also written for news outlets like The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg News, The Kansas City Star and The Indianapolis Star. You can follow her on Twitter @AllisonPrang.
