When Alison Espach, MFA ’09, was a student in Washington University’s MFA program, she had a side gig as an attendant for a company that provided photo booths for private parties and events.
Most of those were weddings. She recalls many nights set up on the edges of a venue space, dressed in finery and watching the guests as all the pageantry, pathos and drama unfolded.
“Weddings really started to feel like a play to me,” she says. “Here, in one room, were people normally not associated with each other. You had the guests looking around, sort of judging each other while at the same time trying to connect and not be judged themselves. The stakes, emotionally and financially, were high for the two families blending together. Throw in a lot of booze, and the boundaries went down.
“I knew then it was great material,” she says. “But it took me a long time to figure out how I wanted to use it.”
The result, some 15 years later, is Espach’s third novel, The Wedding People (Henry Holt and Company, 2024), a romp of a book that takes place at a destination wedding in Newport, Rhode Island. In addition to a self-absorbed bride who demands perfection at every turn, Espach added a college instructor from St. Louis, Phoebe Stone, who has just found out that her professor husband is cheating on her. Phoebe has checked into the resort clad in her finest dress with the intent to end her life — but not before having one final, self-indulgent week knowing she has nothing to lose.
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Who: Alison Espach, MFA ’09, associate professor at Providence College
Previous novels: The Adults (Scribner, 2011), named by the Wall Street Journal to its year-end best list; Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance (Henry Holt and Company, 2022), named a “Best Book of the Year” by NPR and The Chicago Tribune
WashU influences: She cites two who made an impact on her: Kathryn Davis, the Hurst Writer in Residence in Arts & Sciences, and Kellie Wells, the former director of The Writing Program at WashU who now teaches at the University of Alabama. “I read Wells’ book Compression Scars before coming to St Louis and really felt a kinship with her,” Espach says. “And I just got an email the other day from Kathryn. She was really wonderful, and one of the reasons I wanted to come to WashU. I felt close to both Wells and Davis as writers. Both of them had great eyes for absurdities.”
That’s just the first two pages. Nothing goes as planned, and Phoebe gradually finds herself in an unexpected, amusing situation. The bride, Lila, befriends Phoebe, and the two share stories, bottles of vodka, even clothing as they size each other up. “Lila has the spindle legs of a Shaker table. Meanwhile, Phoebe has the body of a woman who has been drinking gin and tonics in bed for a year,” Espach writes.
It’s just one of the funny lines in The Wedding People, a novel that takes place over one week and leaves you laughing, crying and nodding affirmatively on more than a few pages. It’s a funny and poignant look at the chance encounters life can throw at us, with the joy, frivolity and, at times, absurdity of a wedding ever looming.
The novel has reached critical and popular acclaim, from being chosen as a “#ReadWithJenna” Book Club selection by Jenna Hager of Today, to becoming a New York Times bestseller, climbing as high as No. 2 on the hardcover fiction list. As the month began, it was still in the top 10, ranking No. 7 as of Feb. 11, 2025. It was also named one of Time magazine’s “100 Must-Read Books of 2024.”
Espach, who teaches creative writing as an associate professor at Providence College in Rhode Island, is hitting her stride as a novelist and enjoying the happy intersection of commercial success and personal fulfillment.
“With my first two books, I was working through some of the big questions of my writing life,” she says. “Asking myself, ‘What kind of stories do I want to tell? How do I want to tell them?’ When I didn’t know the answer, my response was to just write all the different versions.
“I used up a lot of time and energy trying many different avenues. By the time I got to The Wedding People, I was confident in what I was doing. I made deliberate choices and stuck with them — and confidently said goodbye to all the other versions of this book that could exist.”
That’s where the fun of writing The Wedding People came in for Espach, as she says even she didn’t know exactly where the story would take her. “I knew the setup and the scenario, and I was attracted to this idea of all this happening in this enclosed space,” she says. “But I didn’t know what was going to happen or why. I was energized by not knowing.”
“Maybe you’re not the kind of person who would ever imagine themselves becoming obsessed with their wedding, but perhaps it’s the nature of the beast.”
Alison Espach
For not knowing where she was going, Espeach created a book that is a lot of fun to read, and poignant at times, too. Before The Wedding People was published last July, TriStar Pictures won a bidding war for the film rights and chose Oscar-nominated writer Nicole Holofcener to adapt the screenplay. In the meantime, Espach continues to teach classes and is at work on her fourth novel. Though that new book may not feature a wedding, Espach thinks she’ll always be intrigued by the real-life drama and character development embedded in the ritual.
“People invest so much time, money and energy into them, especially now,” Esbach says. “Anytime that happens, it breeds perfectionism. Maybe you’re not the kind of person who would ever imagine themselves becoming obsessed with their wedding, but perhaps it’s the nature of the beast.”
