Customer Reviews

A More Perfect Union: How I Survived the Happiest Day of My Life

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Hanna Schank's story of "How I Survived the Happiest Day of My Life" is essential reading for any bride, groom, family member, wedding party member, newlywed, wedding guest, literature fan, or memoir fan. I read this book just a year after planning my own wedding, I had repeated moments of identification with Schank's experience. I would have loved to have been given this book as a bride-to-be.

Schank was a highly successful 30-year-old New York woman when she got engaged. She experienced a year of the tug of Bridezilla-ness despite her best efforts to keep her wedding plans in check. The became obsessed with her wedding colors despite her original plans to allow everyone to dress as they wished. She initially spurned registries and then became irritated with people who didn't believe in them. After laughing at the notion of Save the Date cards, Schank painstakingly hand-tied bows on hundreds of them, and was then crushed when they didn't garner effuse praise from the recipients. At some point, Schank succumbed to the belief in "My Day" and flew off the handle at vendors who refused alter their standard packages to meet her unique needs.

In addition to her first-hand bride experience, Schank possesses research skills and an MFA in non-fiction writing, so she is supremely qualified to reflect on her experience with the modern bridal industry. She muses about the invention of the registry, about the social networking of wedding site The Knot, about the "once in a lifetime" mantra of the wedding industrial machine (spend the money, this is once in a lifetime), and about traditional Victorian etiquette versus the realities of modern life.

Grammy serves as the perfect foil to all of Schank's wedding planning. Over the telephone, Schank has to repeatedly explain to her aged grandmother the wedding plans, the reasons behind traditions, and what she needs from her relatives. Schank's witty prose ties the story together well. One of my favorite passages is about the trickle of wedding gifts that start arriving after the invitations are mailed: "Other people called our parents and informed them that they didn't see anything on the registry they liked, and therefore wanted to know what else we might want. This was particularly confusing because the whole point of having a registry in the first place was so that people won't have to call you up and ask you what you want. In theory, everything you want is on the registry. And really, who cared if the gift-giver didn't like anything on the registry? It wasn't going to them ... People want to sent you something that they see as representative of their personality, even if their personality representation isn't necessarily something you want hanging around your house. You therefore must live with a butt-ugly set of ceramic dessert plates or a set of Judaic art depicting a Jewish bridge and groom in renaissance costume, as opposed to the really nice set of crystal highball glasses you spent several weeks hunting for."

The combination of personal experience, terrific research and historical perspective, and witty naration makes this memoir a surefire winner.

This weddingland memoir takes the modern-day nuptial industry to task with a sense of humor and honesty that is unrelenting. By recounting her own experiences as a bride-to-be, Hana Schank illustrates how the "manufactured need" pawned by industry magazines, shops and web sites turns perfectly independent and cosmopolitan women (like her) into obsessive denizens of the commercial culture. The author's capacity for self-depreciation not only helps to illustrate wedding excesses and absurdities (she spends weeks tying fancy ribbons for her save-the-date cards), but it makes her a very likable companion for the book's 211 pages. This is a deft and entertaining read, whether you're married, single or somewhere in-between.

Hana Schank channels both her inner Martha Stewart and her inner Larry David as she spends a year preparing for her "more perfect" wedding. As she chronicles her conversations with salespeople, extended family, and on-line confidents, she is honest about her naked reactions to the odd world surrrounding the bride-to-be. Her engaging writing chronicles the annoying, tasteless, and touching encounters that are the landmines on her path to the altar. In the end, she makes sense of these wedding traditions through her experience of the changing tides of family ties. Schank is not too hip to have a real wedding, but her wit, cynicism, and romanticism combine to produce an entertaining and emotional memoir.

Schank puts into perspective the terrible difficulty young women face in both trying to be themselves and trying to fit into a world where women comment upon each choice other women make. Women have made great strides in the last decades in becoming equals to men, yet they continue to torture each other with minute details of how things need to be done and how one must behave. Schank makes you laugh until it hurts as she tells the story of her reluctant trip into weddingland. Anyone who is planning a wedding or who knows someone planning a wedding should definitely hurry and get this book.

Hana Schank lives up to the promise of the subtitle ("How I Survived the Happiest Day of My Life") to her marriage memoir A More Perfect Union with humor, history, and a self-aware look at just how this modern, feminist-minded woman got caught up in everything from flower colors to save the date cards. "In just a few weeks they had become my new vital statistics," Schank writes about the post-engagement facts of her life as strangers swarm her to find out every detail of her nuptials, her "Rosetta stone" of a ring blaring to anyone she meets that she is about to get married.

Using her own foray onto wedding website The Knot's message boards and reading of wedding magazines as background, Schank proceeds to recount the ways the process getting married changed her, and what she learns about the wedding industry along the way. She's telling the story as both an observer and participant, going back and forth with facts she doles out about the corporate and cultural pressure on brides to how these intimately affected her.

Schank talks about the things one isn't usually supposed to mention when it comes to the joy of weddings--namely divorce, baby pressure, the picking and choosing of religious traditions. She acknowledges the clashes she and her husband have over the wedding planning, such as his anger that he's not once asked his opinion about their flower choices.

This is not simply a tirade against the wedding industry, or it would not be such a delight to read. Schank and her fiancé Steven are able to laugh at those around them--and themselves--pretending to shoot at each other with the scanner while adding to their registry, or joking on their way to retrieve her wedding dress:

"I feel like I should be yelling at some imaginary kids back there or something," I said.
Steven turned his head to the back of the van. "Stop hitting your brother!" he yelled.
I laughed. "Who wants to watch the Finding Nemo DVD again?" I asked the backseat.

What becomes crystal clear from page one is how much of their wedding planning is not only inclusive of, but dependent on, their families, from what to wear during the wedding weekend softball game to how Schank's divorced and divisive parents will be able to come together. Reading her final chapter, in which her fiance's brother gets a concussion during the softball game and various mishaps occur, I certainly teared up when Schank's parents join her to walk down the aisle, adding a blissful conclusion to the often-stressful weekend. "And right then I realize that this was the moment I planned the entire wedding for. If weddings are about fantasies, then this was mine: I wanted my family back together again, even if it was for a few fleeting seconds. And right then, as I bask in the warmth of my family, it is all worth it. The months of tears and obsession and ribbon and Martha Stewart. It is all worth it."

These sentences show that while her marriage is, in large part, about, as the rabbi tells Schank, "sovereignty," an us-against-the-world partnership between the bride and groom, in many other ways it is about joining two people, and two (or more) families, about the negotiations and compromises Schank and her relatives and her fiancé and his relatives all have to make to create this "happiest day" of her life.

Her final chapter, a post-script about the reactions to her book from various sides of the wedding world, is the most illuminating. Schank concludes that even so-called "bridezillas" don't think they're any more wedding-obsessed than anyone else, and even though she has herself marveled at why anyone could care so passionately about ribbon, she emerges with a sympathetic attitude toward brides of all stripes. When Schank writes about her feminist critics that, "It makes it easy for people to tell you you're not being the right kind of girl," she could be writing about any number of female realms, from mothering to sex work to bikini waxes to breast implants, in which women's choices are debated and attacked with viciousness. This isn't a how-to book (or a how-not-to book), but I'd imagine that many prospective brides and grooms will enjoy and learn from Schank's story, or at least have someone to commiserate with.

What makes this book special is that it's both a laugh- and cry-out-loud memoir, and an insider's look at the ways wedding hype has descended on Americans, particularly New Yorkers. Schank is smart enough to know when she's being manipulated, but it's her very awareness, sharpened by historical facts long with the very modern reality of one-bride-upsmanship and the quest for perfection in every area, even as she goes through the process of being (sometimes) swept away, that adds depth to A More Perfect Union.

Here is the story of a 30 year old NYC writer and how she navigated the terrors of the wedding industry to plan her Big Day. I was really enjoying this book for a time. She put dumb, restrictive expectations and traditions under the microscope and researched where they came from and what they really mean. Fascinating! I was under the impression that she was going to end up telling us about a wedding that didn't use any of the elements that she kept saying she didn't care about or didn't like. And the moral of the story would be that the whole thing didn't have to be so stressful and impersonal as she was making most weddings sound.

Nope. In the end she ends up acting just like the women on Knot.com that she had been making fun of just a few chapters earlier. She went crazy nutso over flowers (something she'd said she couldn't care less about), color schemes, apples... It was very disappointing to read about her turning into the bridezilla she had dreaded. Her conclusion was that all of the fighting, crying, stroke-having was worth it because it really was the best, most perfect day EVER! It was just kind of sad that she kept talking about how she didn't care about so many of the things that traditional weddings need to have, but she was supposed to care, so she did care. She even said that her future husband didn't care either, but he didn't have to because he was a guy. Because future husbands obviously have nothing to do with weddings. AHHHH!!!

I guess I just don't see where she was going with this book. Why was it pointing out the evils of the wedding industrial complex if it was just going to advise us to lay back and take it?

This book was such a fun take on wedding planning.

"The wedding obsessed story of a bride to be who believes that matching napkins colors to bridesmaid dresses will determine her future happiness - hilarious!"

Whether you are planning a wedding or about to attend a wedding, I recommend reading this book. Hana Schank will take you step-by-step through all that one goes through when venturing down this path.

For the bride and groom, Hana's book will help you think through many of the important decisions that one needs to make in wedding planning (location), as well as to help you to decide which trivial details you may choose to avoid without regret (the city of the postage cancellation on the invitations.)

If you will be attending a wedding anytime soon, Hana's book really will help you to appreciate all the excruciating fine-tuned detail that goes into planning a wedding. (Don't complain if there's no cake, there's a dessert bar and there's a reason for that, that's what the bride and groom wanted!)

Personally, what I really liked about the book is that it gives some explanation and history about certain wedding traditions to help you put into perspective those ideas which you may want to preserve and those that you may want to drop. Hana also encourages people to be creative at their wedding, even if they are breaking tradition.

Best of all, Hana describes all of this with her great sense of dry humor as she describes the various characters and situations she is confronted with while dutifully attending to weddingland antics.

Hana is definitely a non-traditionalist. As a reader, I felt sympathetic to Hana while trying to buck convention on various wedding traditions. However, we realize that even the staunchest of people can get caught up in the pressure of the media, and our guests expectations in dictating to us 'how a wedding should be.' Thank you, Hana, for giving me a fresh perspective on weddings. I will never look at them the same way.

I read this book because my daughter is planning a wedding of her own. It is delightful, lighthearted and I recommend it highly.