Always a Bridesmaid (For Hire)

January 23, 2017
How does a woman who doesn’t love weddings wind up with nine bridesmaid dresses and her own business, Bridesmaid for Hire? With wit and honesty, Glantz breezily shares tales of her awful online first dates and her transformation from beleaguered bridesmaid into a highly skilled and prized bridesmaid machine who is happily single. Glantz was a recent college graduate with a low-paying PR job in New York and a loving yenta for a mother who tried (long-distance from Florida) to find her daughter a husband. Meanwhile, she was deluged with calls from girlfriends asking her to be a bridesmaid. She realized after a few jaunts down the aisle that she had become her circle’s wedding expert, armed with tips for the stressed-out members of the wedding parties, and that her troubles and time could be turned into a money-making enterprise. Following two bridesmaid requests on the same Friday from former friends she hadn’t talked to in years, Glantz boozily created a Craigslist ad offering her expertise, which was quickly picked up by Buzzfeed and the Knot. Within a week, she was on television and her new business was legitimate, though not without a steep learning curve. Though Glantz sometimes overshares and tries too hard to get laughs, she writes in a charming and funny fashion that makes her easy to root for.

December 1, 2016
A millennial's account of how she went from being the girl all her female friends wanted at their weddings to a professional bridesmaid.The thought of weddings never inspired Glantz, who founded Bridesmaid for Hire. As a child, she wondered about which toy she'd find in her next McDonald's Happy Meal, while other girls contemplated "the cuts of their future [wedding] rings, the colors of their future flowers, and the flavors of their future cakes." By the time she graduated from college, Glantz had become a veteran of "bad dates...email breakups [and] Tinder messages full of bad grammar and lame come-ons," while her friends had settled into long-term relationships. A chance encounter with a soon-to-be-married friend drove the author to shake up her life with a move to New York. Finding work as a "bottom-level PR assistant" with a salary that "resemble[d] that of a top-level intern," she was soon under pressure from her mother to find a husband or, at the very least, freeze her eggs. In the meantime, she found herself attending--and very often saving--her friends' weddings. On a half-drunk whim, Glantz put an offer on Craigslist to provide "professional bridesmaid" services, which included making sure other bridesmaids didn't "paint their nails lime green" and "holding up the 18 layers of [a wedding dress]" while brides used the bathroom. Her post went viral, and soon she was besieged with requests from brides all over the country. Yet temporary celebrity did nothing for her professional life, which at one point included three jobs. But as she continued working with brides, Glantz learned more about love than she imagined. Some married "the first person they kissed"; others, like the woman with a gay boyfriend, married people who could never fully return their love. Funny and at times touching, the book is a thoroughly modern story about love and youth, right down to the open, not necessarily happy-ever-after ending. Quirky and bighearted.

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