Wedding Cake for Breakfast
Read Wedding Cake for Breakfast Online
Authors: Kim Perel
Praise for
Wedding Cake for Breakfast
“If you want to smile, cry, laugh, grieve, or just plain nod knowingly in the face of newlywedded supposed-to-be's, this book is your friend.” âLaura Munson, author of
This Is Not the Story You Think It Is
“These insightful essays offer so much more than one might expect from a collection about the first year of marriage. When you treat yourself to
Wedding Cake for Breakfast
, you will come away entertained, encouraged, and enlightened, as if you'd just spent a weekend in the company of dear friends.ӉTherese Fowler, author of
Souvenir and Exposure
“
Wedding Cake for Breakfast
is a pure delight! What a wonderful reminder that in the end we are
all
neurotic, scared, and somewhat delirious as we navigate that often wacky but usually happy first year of marriage.ӉJessica Anya Blau, author of
Drinking Closer to Home
“I loved
Wedding Cake
so much, I just couldn't put it down! I highly recommend this delightful and delightfully frank look at marriage in its blush of infancy (aka before the dysfunction kicks in). Men: if you want to understand your bride, read this book. It pulls the curtain back to reveal the fertile imagination lurking in the female mind.”
âJenny Gardiner, author of
Slim to None
“
Wedding Cake for Breakfast
is a perfectly rendered collection of wise and funny memories about the exquisitely complex first year of marriage. Simmering with love and powered by talented writers who paint hope and heart into every story, this book should be required reading for anyone who has or is about to tie the knot.”
âAnn Wertz Garvin, author of
On Maggie's Watch
WEDDING CAKE
for
BREAKFAST
Essays on the Unforgettable First Year of Marriage
Edited by
KIM PEREL
and
WENDY SHERMAN
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Copyright © 2012 by Kim Perel and Wendy Sherman
A continuation of this copyright page appears on page 254.
Cover design by Diana Kolsky
“Readers Guide” copyright © 2012 by Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
Cover photo: “Couple” © Heather Landis / Getty Images
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PUBLISHING HISTORY
Berkley trade paperback edition / May 2012
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Wedding cake for breakfast : essays on the unforgettable first year of marriage / edited by Kim Perel and Wendy Sherman.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-101-58080-6
1. Marriage. 2. Newlyweds. I. Perel, Kim. II. Sherman, Wendy.
HQ734.W426 2012
306.8âdc23
2011043949
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Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity.
In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers;
however, the stories, the experiences, and the words are the authors' alone.
For my grandparents who, altogether, have been married 120 years total and counting.
For my mom who taught me how to live, and for my dad who taught me how to love.
âKim Perel
For Samantha and Alexandra. You are my everything.
âWendy Sherman
Introduction
We fell in love over half-eaten club sandwiches. Not with each other, but with an idea. Framed in the window of a cozy, if slightly cramped, West Village café on Bedford Street, two agents and an editor met for lunch to discuss the business of literature, and ended up talking for hours about life and relationshipsâthe stuff of literature. In the glow of the window's tiny, twinkling lights, Wendy, Andie, and I discovered that we had each circled around a similar book concept: a collection that would pay tribute to the exhilarating and unpredictable first year of marriage.
As we sipped coffee from oversize mugs and watched bearded bicyclists and yellow cabs roll down the cobblestone streets, Andie told us that in the first year of her marriage, the same year the economy collapsed, her husband was laid off from his job. Though their early months of marriage weren't comprised of the lighter, furniture-buying days she'd imagined, she explained how she and her husband adjusted,
and together found a new normal.
Possessed by the human (and often female) impulse to share, I talked about a couple I knew who wound up in a long-distance marriage for the first six months after their wedding, seeing each other only on weekends after long flights and taxing workweeks. Then Wendy told us about a friend of hers whose husband was diagnosed with a rare illness in their first married year; a year her friend spent sitting in hospital waiting rooms filled with the worst kind of anticipation. We all agreed the term
honeymoon period
was a misnomer.
In all the stories we told, it seemed that each of the couples dealt with real life so suddenly after the headiness of their matrimony that it was like coming down from a drug. Both man and wife had handled obstacles like illness and money troubles before marriage, but never as a lawfully wedded couple. Now it all held more gravityâthere was a future to imagine, new families to be considered, a marriage to uphold. Though for all the couples we discussed it seemed that, instead of becoming distant, they got stronger, and only held on to each other more tightly.
As the restaurant emptied, I told
them about another close friend of mine. She was an obsessive, creative type with a stubborn streak and a tendency toward grand ideas that were nearly impossible to execute; a somewhat lethal personality cocktail to have when planning a wedding. In preparation for her nuptials, this friend ensured that every bead on her dress, every note the band played, and every flower petal fit into the aesthetic vision she had of her
Big Day
. The result was a gorgeous logistical quagmire of a wedding that left her guests feeling a mixture of bliss and exhaustion in its wake.
A group of us celebrated with the couple after the wedding and stayed over in a Lower East Side hotel
.
In the morning, I went over to my friend's bridal suite to ask the newlyweds what they had planned for breakfast, and found the couple in the living room area hunched over an open cake box. Ravaged and topped with melting white icing, their once-pristine red velvet wedding cake looked like a tiny mass of snowcapped mountains. “I was so busy at the wedding I didn't get to try the cake,” my friend admitted.
I watched as she and her husband spent the first morning of their marriage side by side on the sofa with the top tier of their wedding cake on their laps, shoveling dollops of cream-cheese frosting and crimson cake into their mouths with flimsy plastic utensils.
“I can't believe you two are married,” I said. I turned to my friend. “What are you going to do now that you don't have to plan the wedding of the century?” It was a playful jab, but she and her husband's faces seemed to dissolve. Perhaps it was the fact that they were twenty-five years old, or that they hadn't planned for anything but appetizers and invitations in the past year, but swap out the hotel couch for the back of a bus and their expressions were eerily similar to those of Ben and Elaine at the end of
The Graduate.
Freeze-frame that expression. That, we decided, is where our book starts.
The essays you're about to read pick up after the Hollywood ending, when a man has already thrown rocks at a bedroom window to win over a woman, or someone has already run through the airport and begged the other person not to leave. Of course, so many Hollywood movies are contrived with dramatic emotional swells because the everyday grind doesn't have quite the same cinematic appeal. Love stories usually end with weddings instead of beginning with them. That's why, despite the more complex circumstances surrounding the marriages that inspired this book idea, we imagined a continuation of those romantic storylines, essays filled with sitcom-esque gaffes, perfect narrative arcs, and voyeuristic allure. We envisioned newly married couples having playful squabbles over how much (or how little) sex to have, run-ins with overbearing but well-meaning mother-in-laws, and witticisms about messy bathrooms, which would be, I'm ashamed to admit:
cute
. Instead, this book took on a life of its own with stories that were raw, wonderful, and strange all at once, proving that the days devoid of melodrama are the truly rich ones and that strong writers don't need the will-they-won't-they high-stakes marriage at the end of their stories to be captivating and moving, only the everyday complications of the modern marriage and the quiet angst of ordinary domestic life.
In her poignant essay “Shared Anniversary,” native New Yorker Daphne Uviller remembers her beautiful ceremony alongside the horror of 9/11, but while her wedding date will always be too close to tragedy for comfort, she realizes that she can hold on to her husband when the ground beneath them is splitting. Other essays are quirky, like Abby Sher's “Juan and Marita,” in which the author imagines her hand-me-down cake toppers as stand-ins for her deceased parents, like guardian angels fashioned from Play-Doh. She reveals how giving away those cake toppers amplified her loss, as she built a new life without her parents in that first year. Darcie Maranich is achingly candid about the reality of her husband's return from deployment and how difficult it was to bring him back into the family fold. Meanwhile, Sarah Pekkanen explores the change in family dynamics that marriage creates with an essay about
how her mother was terrified of losing her daughter to her in-laws, fearing that she would somehow disappear into her new husband's family. Amy Wilson ruminates on what it means when married couples fight, while Sophie Littlefield cautions against what can happen when couples pretend nothing is wrong. Others, like Cathy Alter's “Ciao Baggage,” a story about losing luggage on a trip to Italy with her husband, and realizing that love is more important than clean underwear, offer levity.
Lines like Andrea Collier's “the first year is the thing you have to get through to get to the marriage part” felt like sage advice, whereas Susan Shapiro disclosed thoughts most women would keep to themselves. Candid admissions like those in Susan's essay, “The Last Honeymoon,” in which she finds herself secretly fantasizing about being on her tropical paradise honeymoon with an old flame, would be taboo among friends in the thick of that heated first year, but in these pages she is free to divulge.
So while we weren't exactly sure what subject matters might be broached in the anthology, we did know that we wanted to provide our authors with a great deal of latitude. That's why we had only one stipulation: that the essays take place within that pivotal first year of marriage. We wanted to allow for the widest possible creative space for each writer to express (or confess) how she genuinely felt when her marriage was in its infancy, and we were curious to line up the snapshots of women in the first year of their together-forever lives and see what truths might develop.
I say snapshots because we're not tackling the first year of marriage in its entirety in this book. We know that modern marriage is more disparate than ever from one couple to the next, so we wanted to gather as many different pictures as possible. At the wedding, the snapshots are clear and these days there are so many photos taken of the bride and groom that the entire event can practically be reconstructed through time-lapse photography. In those pictures, everyone is smiling and gesturing, and the bride is wearing more concealer on her face than ever before. It's usually quite obvious what a wedding and a bride look like. But the prompting photographer is conveniently absent when that first fight happens or when the couple realizes that they each had different ideas about sightseeing on their honeymoon, or how to spend the wedding money they were gifted. The picture of what a wedding looks like is defined and recognizable, while the portrait of a married couple is blurrier, taking more time to come into focus.
Since marriage looks different to everyone, it's hard to know exactly how to reconcile both your concepts of “home” or “how married people act.” In all of these stories, it seemed that the connective tissue running through them was that you learn as you go and eventually figure out the couple you'd like to beâbecause no one knows exactly how to be married at first.
That's why, in the most optimistic of worlds, when we finished editing the essays, I hoped for a collection to which married women could relate. What I was surprised to find was that I, too, could relate. I'm not married and I never have been, but I saw pieces of myself (and my past relationships) in each of these essays, and my hope is that you too will find pieces of yourself all throughout this collection, too.
By the time we organized the essays, the book felt like one interconnected journey and we wanted a singular cover image to capture that. What our brilliant designer, Diana, came up with was an artful portrayal of two newlyweds trying to keep their heads above water. You can't see the looks on their respective faces, so you don't know if they look stupefied by the vast ocean of decisions, compromises, and obstacles that lie before themâlike my friends seemed that morningâor if they're wearing brave smiles.
I think their expressions depend on your own outlook, though I like to envision that either way they're in it together, holding each other's hand.
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