Book #75 |
Book: Mergers and Acquisitions: Or, Everything I Know About Love I Learned on the Wedding Pages | Author: Cate Doty | |
| Source: Library loan Format: Print |
Pages: 356 | Duration: 08/19/25 – 08/20/25 (2 days) | |
| Rating: ★★★★☆ | Genres: nonfiction, memoir, humor, romance, journalism, sociology | ||
| 📕10-word summary: The NYT’s wedding announcement publication process and author’s coming-of-age story. 🖌6-word review: Career more interesting than coming-of-age aspect. |
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| 💭A favorite quote: “As best we could, we copied Mrs. Shaw, who reeked of Virginia Slims and was as tanned as a leather handbag.” | |||
| 🎓Some new-to-me words: rumaki, forfend, loucheness, vaunted | |||
| Description:* In New York City in pursuit of love — and to write for The New York Times — Cate Doty finds her natural home in the wedding section, a first step to her own happily-ever-after, surely. Soon she is thrown into the cutthroat world of the metropolitan society pages, experiencing the lengths couples go to have their announcements accepted and the lengths the writers go in fact-checking their stories; the surprising, status-signaling details that matter most to brides and grooms; and the politics of the paper at a time of vast cultural and industry changes. Reporting weekly on couples whose relationships seem enviable — or eye-roll worthy — and dealing with WASPy grandparents and last-minute snafus, Cate is surrounded by love, or what we’re told to believe is love. But when she starts to take the leap herself, she begins to ask her own questions about what it means to truly commit…*From goodreads.com’s synopsis. | |||
| Thoughts: I worked with Cate for a few months, which is what drew me to this book. I always wondered how someone went from working in NYC on the wedding/society pages of the NYT to being a marketing content strategist for an open source software company in Raleigh, NC, but I never had a conversation with her about it. I was most interested in this book from a professional editor perspective and really enjoyed those aspects of it. I’m really not interested in weddings, though, and I did skim over parts of the book where she wrote about movies about weddings (e.g., My Best Friend’s Wedding, Father of the Bride, The Wedding Singer, & Runaway Bride), since I hadn’t seen a single one of them. I made it 80% through the book before encountering my pet peeve, overused word, conspiratorially: “My grandmother leaned forward conspiratorially in her chair. ‘The Coast Guard took me on a submarine,’ she whispered.” I did appreciate that this book did a good job of acknowledging the role race, class, heteronormativity, and patriarchy played in the decisions made about which announcements — and what information and how many details were included in them — got into the society pages of the NYT. | |||
See the rest of the books I’ve read in 2025 and previous years: 2024 | 2023 | 2022 | 2021 | 2020 | 2019.
