LIVE from NYPL: REBECCA MEAD in conversation with Henry Alford: The Selling of the American Wedding

Event Details

WHAT IS A WEDDING FOR?

Rebecca Mead will be in conversation with Henry Alford to discuss Bridezillas, ministers-for-hire, heirloom manufacturers, Disney's Fairy Tale Weddings program, and the Oh, Mommy moment. For better or for worse, the way we marry is the way we are. So what does the American wedding with its softball games, its matching linens, and its $161 billion industrial infrastructure tell us about American life today?

About Rebecca Mead

Rebecca Mead is the author of One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding, a book that does for the matrimony industry what Jessica Mitford in the American Way of Death did for the funeral business, according to Holly Brubach in the New York Times. Mead was born in London, educated at Oxford and at N.Y.U. She has been a staff writer at the New Yorker since 1997, where she has interviewed everyone from goat herders in Mongolia to members of the fashion-obsessed social elite of Såo Paulo, and from Slavoj Žižek to Shaquille O'Neal.

 

About Henry Alford

Henry Alford is the author of a humor collection, Municipal Bondage: One Man's Anxiety-Producing Adventures on the Big City, and of an account of his misadventures in the acting trade, Big Kiss: One Actor's Desperate Attempt to Claw His Way to the Top, which won a Thurber Prize. He contributes to Vanity Fair, the New York Times, and the New Yorker.