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February 24, 2014
Freelance writer and editor Doll has a love-hate relationship with weddings, of which she has attended more than 20, recounting with humor and honesty the highs and lows of each. While successful in her professional life, Doll dates a series of boyfriends while she tries to figure out what she does and doesn’t want from relationships, how to achieve it and whether she even wants to get married in a very modern era where more people get hitched later in life or not at all. Looking for wisdom and inspiration, she examines her parent’s long union, which has survived moves around the country and countless absences, with each evening bringing the two of them together for martinis. Her parents give her common-sense answers—share the same values, have fun together—that leave her feeling like there’s more to it than just those basics. The weddings of her friends provide their own lessons, such as when she sees and hears how the couples are getting along and knows what’s lacking in her relationship with her boyfriend and is finally compelled to break up. And, after too many weddings with too many drinks consumed and tales of bad behavior (like drunkenly making out with a groom at his bachelor party) she takes note and tries for a more adult approach with a little less drama and wine. In the end, Doll offers a refreshing take on society’s evolving ideas on marriage and the importance of knowing oneself.

March 15, 2014
A debut memoir chronicling the author's feelings about the many weddings she has attended. Doll is an established writer and editor who has been to more than 20 weddings since she was in diapers. Throughout the book, a bewildering mass of anecdotes, incidents, musings and emotions whirls past, blurring together and leaving little lasting effect. The author is always attentive to the details of clothing, decorations and environments, but her powers of description are limited, with a heavy reliance on lists and cliched phrases. One of the most engaging parts of the book is the story of her parents' courtship and marriage, and her lively mother may be the most vivid and sympathetic portrait. Doll raises all the persistent difficult questions about how to pick the right person, how to make it work, how much work is a reasonable amount, but most of her advice is predictable. She covers the usual anxieties of the single person whose friends are all getting married, as well as many questions about the place of marriage in modern life, but Doll skims the surface of them, as she does her own emotions. Her preoccupation with weddings seems to come down to lingering childhood fantasies, a love of parties and a niggling sense of missing out, despite her overall satisfaction with single life. As the narrative progresses, Doll's lighthearted charm fades as she repeatedly laughs off and rationalizes her own volatile and damaging drunken behavior. In one rock-bottom episode, she combines material display with titillating dysfunction by informing us of the exact cost of the shoes she flung down the street as her friends tried to subdue her. Party-loving singles with an anxious interest in the weddings of friends may find a kindred soul here. Those looking for emotional depth or original insights may not.

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April 15, 2014
In this insightful memoir, Doll examines weddings and marriage through the lens of her own friends' unions. She has been to numerous weddings, and she has stories from all of them, ranging from confronting a high-school nemesis, to aiding a bride who has a severe allergic reaction to peanuts, to having a drunken meltdown in a bar as her friends are trying to get her to go home. Doll's impressions of her friends' intendeds are mostly positive, but her inability to support one pairing ends up costing her a friendship. Doll runs into this friend, Ginny, at several weddings, and despite her attempts to make amends, the rift is never quite healed. Though she dreads the clich'd bouquet toss, like so many other singletons, she can't help but wonder if she will find love during the course of one wedding weekend. Doll is an engaging guide through the landscape of modern-day courtship and nuptials, and her book will have particular appeal for women in their twenties, thirties, and forties navigating the wedding circuit themselves.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)

December 1, 2013

It's the era of mega-weddings, and Doll has been to dozens of them--for childhood friends, for friends she's then lost, all the way to Jamaica. I've heard nothing but raves about this compendium from Doll, who's made her name as a smart, sassy observer writing for venues from the Atlantic to Vice.

Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.