Informationen zum Autor Karen Schwartz is a columnist for the New York Sun. She has written for magazines, including Glamour, Self, Marie Claire, Mademoiselle, Redbook, and Spy. This is her first novel. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.Visit her website at www.clearingtheaisle.com. Klappentext They're getting hitched.When Rachel Silverstein and her longtime boyfriend Dan Gershon decide to get engaged, they hardly expect that planning a wedding will be more difficult than any life changes they've braved in the five years they've been dating. After all, they already live together. But suddenly everyone from parents to friends to cousins to caterers seems to be losing their minds completely. Surely it can't all be in Rachel's head. Can it?She's going insane.Between her budget-crazed father, her flighty mother, her stepmother, her seemingly perfectly well-meaning in-laws, and a fiancé who's suddenly questioning the very institution of marriage, Rachel's barely holding it together. If the guest-list wars and menu battles don't kill her, the dress-shopping will. And what's it going to take for Dan to step up and realize that his beloved future bride needs his help coping with the madness if she's ever going to make it to the altar? Chapter One Looking back, I can pinpoint the exact moment when I knew that planning the wedding would be hell. We were in Washington, standing in the foyer of the Kosmos Club and talking to Kimmy, the overly blonde, overly perky events booker whose nude stockings and curled bangs had put me off from the moment she'd stuck out her hand and said, "You must be the Bride!" in a way that you could tell meant she dotted her i's with little hearts or smiley faces. But I'm being a little hard on Kimmy. After all, she thought she was asking an innocent question when she said, "Now, how many guests were you thinking of?" How could she have known that Phyllis and I would answer in unison? "Between one fifty and two hundred," I said. "Seventy-five," said Phyllis. As Kimmy's eyes darted back and forth between me and my stepmother, I turned to Dan, my fiancé, whose left eyebrow, a slightly arched "heh?," told me that he was just as bewildered as I was. (On most people an eyebrow might not exactly express bewilderment, but on Dan, who had been aptly nicknamed Bodhisattva by his college roommates, it did.) My father, Jerry, stood behind Phyllis, who was smiling and nodding her frosted head confidently. I knew that combo. It was vintage Phyllis. It meant, "Something I don't like has just been said, and if I smile and nod hard enough, I can, by sheer force of will and faux-positive facial muscles, make it go away." Having just met Phyllis, Kimmy had no way of knowing this, and therefore assumed that the smile and nod meant that the two dramatically different numbers she had been quoted could somehow be reconciled. "So, about one seventy-five, then?" Kimmy questioned, looking straight at Phyllis and returning her Stepford grin. "No," Phyllis replied, the smile never cracking, "just seventy-five. We want to keep it small." "We?" I asked, turning to face Phyllis directly as the corners of Kimmy's mouth tensed. "Dad and I," Phyllis answered with a quick double nod and then turned back to beam at Kimmy. Had she forgotten my father's cousins, the ones who actually flew in from places like Phoenix and Denver for all of the bar mitzvahs and weddings? I couldn't recall a family event without my father's cousin Irwin, a San Diego dermatologist, checking moles in a corner near a buffet table. "The kids had mentioned wanting to have the ceremony outside," Phyllis continued. "Is that a possibility?" "Well -- " Kimmy began. I couldn't let it slide. "Whether or not we can do it outside, I doubt that keeping this wedding to seventy-five people is a possibility. Dad's family alone is seventy-five people." I tried to s...

Autorentext

Karen Schwartz is a columnist for the New York Sun. She has written for magazines, including Glamour, Self, Marie Claire, Mademoiselle, Redbook, and Spy. This is her first novel. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Visit her website at www.clearingtheaisle.com.

Klappentext

They're getting hitched. When Rachel Silverstein and her longtime boyfriend Dan Gershon decide to get engaged, they hardly expect that planning a wedding will be more difficult than any life changes they've braved in the five years they've been dating. After all, they already live together. But suddenly everyone from parents to friends to cousins to caterers seems to be losing their minds completely. Surely it can't all be in Rachel's head. Can it? She's going insane. Between her budget-crazed father, her flighty mother, her stepmother, her seemingly perfectly well-meaning in-laws, and a fiancé who's suddenly questioning the very institution of marriage, Rachel's barely holding it together. If the guest-list wars and menu battles don't kill her, the dress-shopping will. And what's it going to take for Dan to step up and realize that his beloved future bride needs his help coping with the madness if she's ever going to make it to the altar?

Zusammenfassung
They're getting hitched.
When Rachel Silverstein and her longtime boyfriend Dan Gershon decide to get engaged, they hardly expect that planning a wedding will be more difficult than any life changes they've braved in the five years they've been dating. After all, they already live together. But suddenly everyone from parents to friends to cousins to caterers seems to be losing their minds completely. Surely it can't all be in Rachel's head. Can it?
She's going insane.
Between her budget-crazed father, her flighty mother, her stepmother, her seemingly perfectly well-meaning in-laws, and a fiancé who's suddenly questioning the very institution of marriage, Rachel's barely holding it together. If the guest-list wars and menu battles don't kill her, the dress-shopping will. And what's it going to take for Dan to step up and realize that his beloved future bride needs his help coping with the madness if she's ever going to make it to the altar?

Leseprobe
Chapter One

Looking back, I can pinpoint the exact moment when I knew that planning the wedding would be hell. We were in Washington, standing in the foyer of the Kosmos Club and talking to Kimmy, the overly blonde, overly perky events booker whose nude stockings and curled bangs had put me off from the moment she'd stuck out her hand and said, "You must be the Bride!" in a way that you could tell meant she dotted her i's with little hearts or smiley faces.

But I'm being a little hard on Kimmy. After all, she thought she was asking an innocent question when she said, "Now, how many guests were you thinking of?" How could she have known that Phyllis and I would answer in unison?

"Between one fifty and two hundred," I said.

"Seventy-five," said Phyllis.

As Kimmy's eyes darted back and forth between me and my stepmother, I turned to Dan, my fiancé, whose left eyebrow, a slightly arched "heh?," told me that he was just as bewildered as I was. (On most people an eyebrow might not exactly express bewilderment, but on Dan, who had been aptly nicknamed Bodhisattva by his college roommates, it did.) My father, Jerry, stood behind Phyllis, who was smiling and nodding her frosted head confidently. I knew that combo. It was vintage Phyllis. It meant, "Something I don't like has just been said, and if I smile and nod hard enough, I can, by sheer force of will and faux-positive facial muscles, make it go away." Having just met Phyllis, Kimmy had no way of knowing this, and therefore assumed that the smile and nod meant that the two dramatically different numbers she had been quoted could somehow be reconciled.

"So, about one seventy-five, then?" Kimmy questioned, looking straight at Phyllis and returning her Stepford grin.

"No," Phyllis replied, the smile n…