Guest Post with Wendy Wax - My Ex-Best Friend's Wedding ~ JeanBookNerd

Photo Content from Wendy Wax

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution says USA Today bestselling author Wendy Wax “writes with breezy wit and keen insight.” Her contemporary women’s fiction explores family, friendship and self-discovery and has been compared to that of Jennifer Weiner, Jane Green, and Mary Alice Monroe. Her books, A Week at the Lake, While We Were Watching Downton Abbey and her Ten Beach Road novels—Best Beach Ever, One Good Thing, Sunshine Beach, The House On Mermaid Point, Ocean Beach and Ten Beach Road—have been featured in national media such as USA Today, Ladies’ Home Journal, and Woman’s World.

Other works by Wendy Wax include Magnolia Wednesdays, The Accidental Bestseller, Hostile Makeover, Leave it to Cleavage, Single in Suburbia, 7 Days and 7 Nights and the Ten Beach Road novellas Christmas at the Beach and A Bella Flora Christmas. Many of her novels have been published internationally and as audiobooks.

Her fifteenth novel, My Ex-Best Friend’s Wedding, will be released May 14, 2019.

A former broadcaster and the mother of two grown sons, Wendy lives in Atlanta with her husband where she’s traded in her picket fence and gardening gloves for hi-rise living and a desk with a view from the 37th floor.

Like all of my novels My Ex-Best Friend’s Wedding explores family relationships and the kind of friendship that gets us through the toughest times. Set in New York and on the Outer Banks, it revolves around former best friends Lauren and Brianna who met in kindergarten and believed that being born on the same day made them ‘sisters,’ and Lauren’s mother, Kendra, who mothered them both.

The book begins just before Lauren and Bree’s 40th birthday when an unexpected marriage proposal sends Lauren back to the Outer Banks, her former best friend, and the family wedding dress she never thought she’d wear.

QUOTES FROM MY EX-BEST FRIEND'S WEDDING BY WENDY WAX

What can I say about the wedding dress? I can tell you it’s been in my family for generations. That after all these years it’s still beautiful. And what happened the day I wore it wasn’t the dress’s fault. ― Kendra

Although I’ve been replaying it in my mind for over forty years now, I don’t really understand what happened. It was as if everything I’d thought, everything I’d felt, flew out of my head. When Reverend Frailey cleared his voice and said, ‘Dearly Beloved,’ I was struck with a thunderbolt of clarity, or perhaps it was a thunderbolt of panic, that felt as if it had been delivered directly from above. (And I don’t mean the choir loft.) —Kendra

As other women look up, I thank my lucky stars that I put on makeup and washed my hair today. Writing is not the glamorous profession people think it is. In fact, authors spend long periods of time alone, unwashed, and on deadline. Grooming and hygiene can take a distant second to word count. —Lauren

To my children I’m simply She Who Is Always There. And given how not “there” my parents were, I’m proud of the fact that my children never had reason to doubt their parents’ love or affection.

But the truth is I could be out burgling houses or doing some other shocking thing that no one would ever expect of me, and no one would believe it even if they stumbled across me wearing a stocking over my head and climbing into someone’s window. —Bree

Being forty sucks even more than I thought it would. And it turns out I am just the woman to embrace its suckiness. ―Lauren

Clay’s holding a chocolate cupcake with one lit candle in it. Our sixteen-year-old daughter, Lily, stands next to him bearing a mug of coffee.

“Did you finish?” she asks, and I remember that I told them both I was going to type The End before this morning or die in the attempt. That I refused to turn forty until I’d finally finished what I started all those years ago. I know from experience that it’s not a good sign about the material when you fall asleep while you’re writing it. I unclench my hand and rouse the screen and make myself look. “Nope.”

“Here.” She sets the mug on the desk. “You’re close. And it’s not like you have a real deadline or anything.” It’s hard to tell if this is the dig it feels like. If I had a real deadline, as in a contract with a publisher like my former best friend does, it would have been done a decade ago. —Bree

My heart pounds painfully, and I wonder for one of those heartbeats if it’s possible to summon someone simply by dreaming or thinking about them. But if that were true he would have been here years ago.

I step back from the window so I can’t be seen, but I can’t stop looking at him. His dark hair is threaded with silver and there’s not as much of it as there used to be. But he’s still tall. And he’s still absurdly handsome. His taste in clothes has definitely improved.

The last time I saw him he was wearing an ill-chosen powder-blue tuxedo. And I was wearing THE DRESS. —Kendra

When the going gets tough even the toughest of us escape to things more attractive than writing. Things like doing laundry. Scrubbing toilets. Plucking eyebrows. Having oral surgery.” —Lauren

With trembling fingers, I type the magic words The End a few lines below the final paragraph. I stare at those words on the page in the pool of light that spills from the desk lamp. A smile spreads across my face. It’s so large I can actually feel my skin stretching.

I retype the words again. This time all in caps. THE END. Then I go back and add an exclamation point because the occasion demands it. —Bree

I follow my mother toward the full-length mirror but I move even more slowly than I need to, afraid that the way it looks can’t possibly live up to the way it feels, but it does. The satin clings to my shoulders and shows a creamy expanse of chest without being at all revealing. My neck might belong to a swan. And the bodice drops and nips in giving me a 1940s pinup waist then falls to the ground in soft satiny folds. The lace mantilla is a sheer work of art in a fall of flowers that float over the satin. Every inch of it is beautiful. And in it so am I. —Lauren

A wedding dress passed down through generations unravels the tangled threads of three women's lives in a novel of friendship, family, and forgiveness from the USA Today bestselling author of Ten Beach Road.

Prized and stored away for safekeeping, the timeless ivory wedding dress, with its scooped neck and cleverly fitted bodice, sits gently folded in its box, whispering of Happily Ever Afters. To Kendra, Brianna, and Lauren it's a reminder of what could have been, the promise of a fairy tale, and a friendship torn apart. But as Kendra knows firsthand: it wasn't the dress's fault.

Once closer than sisters, Lauren and Bree have grown up and grown apart, allowing broken promises and unfulfilled dreams to destroy their friendship. A successful author, Lauren returns home to the Outer Banks, fianc� in tow, to claim the dress she never thought she'd wear. While Bree, a bookstore owner, grapples with the realities of life after you marry the handsome prince. As the former best friends wrestle with their uncertain futures, they are both certain of one thing: some betrayals can never be forgiven.

Now on the eve of her daughter Lauren's wedding, Kendra struggles with a secret she's kept for far too long. And vows to make sure the dress will finally bring Lauren and Bree back together--knowing they'll need each other to survive the coming storm.

Praise for MY EX-BEST FRIEND'S WEDDING

“My Ex-Best Friend's Wedding is Wendy Wax's best book to date. Filled with her trademark witty dialogue and crisp writing, readers will be immersed in a deeply emotional tale of what family really means, and of friendship lost and found. With a gorgeously descriptive setting in Outer Banks, North Carolina, and carefully crafted characters to laugh and cry with, this should be the first book you put in your beach bag this summer.” —Karen White, New York Times bestselling author of Dreams Of Falling

“My Ex-Best Friend’s Wedding plumbs the depths of true friendship, the beauty, the pain, and the vulnerability it demands. Wax has crafted a beautifully wrought story that will touch your heart and make you value those in your own life. A must read!” —Susan Crandall, author of The Myth of Perpetual Summer

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