Issue 10: My Best Friend's Wedding

In defense of one two-faced, big-haired food critic.

Hey (with the intention to recommend books),

Does this issue find you navigating some ennui? I’m not here to rat you guys out, but the most clicked link from the last dispatch was “Do you actually have friends?” So I am required to ask, by law, I believe, is everyone ok ?

What a stupid question. Of course not. No one is ok! This is the dumbest time to be alive. Certainly one of the most horrifying times to be conscious. A shambles state of affairs. Everything is very, very, very bad.

International and domestic horrors aside, existentially we’re hitting the milestones and the milestones are not hitting. Monachopsis has gone mainstream. The built-in community scaffolding of previous generations is long gone. (Though in fairness, it probably would’ve collapsed under the weight of this global psychic sinkhole we’re calling present day.)

It’s all way too much and not enough. I won’t speak for you guys (I will), but the mood of the moment is really not compatible with a nascent flâneuse lifestyle. On a smaller, more personal scale: no one feels close to anyone, but everyone feels surveilled. These are claustrophobic times! My nervous system is currently such that automatic flushers frighten me. The people yearn for a different pace: something slower, less extractive. Something soft-lit and romantically scored. We all wish life were paced like a rom-com: delayed eye contact, lingering city montages, a total lack of geopolitical context, and the sense that life is always just starting.

Whenever there’s trouble afoot, I have one solution and one solution only: watch My Best Friend’s Wedding. Are you heartbroken? Disillusioned? Lonely? Grappling with your mortality? In need of escape? Watch My Best Friend’s Wedding. It’s a delicious antidote for the comparison thief in your head (crème brûlée can NEVER be Jell-O), the steady hum of collapse, and the myth of linear life progression.

As of late, I’ve been recommending it more than ever. If you haven’t seen it yet, close this browser and scoot on over to whichever streaming service currently possesses it. If you want to know what you’re in for: Jules (Julia Roberts) realizes she's in love with her best friend Michael (Dermot Mulroney) days before he marries Kimmy (Cameron Diaz), and ropes in her friend George (Rupert Everett) as she spirals, schemes, and hopes it’s not too late.

My Best Friend’s Wedding is a romantic comedy with some of the genre’s best tropes: a love triangle, a platonic Grumpy/Sunshine, and the misguided notion that proximity equals inevitability. It’s the Cool Girl original sin and a subversion of the classic fairy tale payoff that’s yet to be outdone.

But really, it’s a parable about holding onto the past too tightly. An homage to small sunglasses. A big, beautiful, perfectly soundtracked freakout about the narrowing of adulthood. A story of Revenge Dressing by proxy, told through the journey of history’s hottest bridesmaid dress.

(It’s very funny and very depressing that this movie, which is so much about lost time and missed chances, stars a bunch of twenty-something actors still at the peak of their collagen production. But I take my sermons where I can get them.)

What exactly is this narrowing adulthood phenomenon, you ask? It’s nebulous, but there are signs. It’s the undertow we’ve all been feeling. That horrible, low-grade grief you haven’t been able to shake lately. The misery, the exquisite tragedy. The Susan Hayward of it all. The assumption of possibility evaporating before your eyes: the Carole Radziwill–style “five good summers left.”

Am I saying My Best Friend’s Wedding is an allegory for trying to find your sense of self at the end of the world? Maybe. (Let me have this!!!)

As I get older, Jules’ maniacal behavior makes more and more sense. The loss of a version of yourself you’re not ready to let go of is not easily shaken. And when that grief has nowhere to go, it can get outsourced: sometimes messily, sometimes without consent. Jules’ fixation on Michael becomes more about preserving a timeline than a person.

So many of us have lost some crucial in-between years: the messy, necessary stretch where you try things on, fall apart a little, have your first of many holy breakdowns about getting older. So when I watch Jules, originally a highly functional overachiever, steal a bread truck and scream into a brick of a cellphone that she’s losing the most tangible symbol of her youth, I relate.

My Best Friend’s Wedding is a perfect film. A movie by the people, for the people (literally). This film, like any great romantic comedy, moves from levity to gravity so deftly that it’s easy to dismiss the emotional weight beneath the chaos. My Brilliant Friend Sophie (queen of rom-coms reads and founder of The Kiss + Tell Book Club) says to go where it’s warm—she told me that when I said I felt disillusioned by aging, by the shape of things, by how little makes sense anymore—and this movie, chaotic and tender as it is, reminds me to do just that. I’ve personally gone from watching it as a romantic heartbreak salve to a platonic one. These days, I hold onto it as proof that I haven’t met all the people I’m going to love yet and that, by God, there'll be dancing. (...I hope.)

Below are books that feel like watching My Best Friend’s Wedding: a little messy, mostly comforting, and unexpectedly sharp. They don’t solve anything that’s happening on a planetary level, but they make life feel more possible through escape, through recognition, or both. Most of them are Romances! And while I will be getting on my high horse about that genre in the very near future—yes, that is a threat!—for now, I will just say genre fiction (and films) mostly get dismissed because they’re pleasurable. But pleasure isn’t unserious. Levity and gravity are not incompatible: Romance novels can be candy-coated and canonical. Profound and poorly written. They are about love after all. You can dismiss them if you like, you can live in a binaristic definition of writing. Or, you can get a life.

Happy reading!