A More Perfect Union
How I Survived the Happiest Day of My Life
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
Hana Schank had never given much thought to her wedding, or even really imagined herself married, so when she found herself suddenly sporting a brand-new engagement ring she assumed planning a small, low-key wedding would be no big deal. But soon she finds herself adrift in Wedding Land, a world where all brides are expected to want to look like Cinderella, where women plan weddings with fantasy butterfly themes, where a woman's wedding is, without question, the Happiest Day of Her Life.
Despite her best efforts not to become a Bridezilla, Hana finds herself transformed from a thirty-year-old woman with a 401(k) into a nearly unrecognizable version of herself as she spends weeks crafting save-the-date cards, worries about matching her cocktails to her wedding colors, and obsessively reads Martha Stewart Weddings magazine.
She decides that, if she is going to follow traditions like wearing white and walking down the aisle with flowers, she at least wants to understand why. In her search she turns up interesting wedding facts: bridesmaids, for instance, were originally recruited to confuse evil spirits. Ultimately, she casts a critical eye on the $72 billion wedding industry, from the women at wedding websites who cackle over the etiquette missteps of others to wedding magazines that provide checklists of 187 tasks to plan the perfect wedding, suggesting that to have anything less is to fail as a bride, as a woman, as a wife.
Part confessional memoir, part social critique, A More Perfect Union chronicles a year in Wedding Land, capturing as it does not only the stresses but the undoubted joys of becoming a bride.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Schank, a former fabulously single Manhattanite, plays wedding historian, documentarian, Brooklynite and cynical bride-to-be in this wry take on the wedding industry. While chronicling the planning nightmares, screw-ups and family squabbles leading up to her big day, Schank pontificates on nuptial-planning touchstones, offering little in the way of surprise: Schank, as she makes clear from the outset, is way cooler than other brides, and, by being aware of how uncool it is to do the uncool things everyone else does (like admiring her engagement ring or reading wedding magazines), she's demonstrating how cool she really is. An episode involving the most important purchase of all-the dress-but packs the not so shocking revelation that most women, regardless of their socio-economic status, want to look like fairy tale princesses standing at the altar. The best material here is the wedding trivia she sprinkles in (bridesmaids were originally supposed to confuse evil spirits; the best man helped the groom carry off an unwilling bride after a little village pillaging), but it's not enough to save an otherwise predictable and not always funny memoir.