Mergers and Acquisitions by Cate Doty: book review

Mergers and Acquisitions: Or, Everything I Know About Love I Learned on the Wedding Pages (2021) is the collection of true conversations with wedding couples when the author was a society page reporter for the newspaper, The New York Times.

The author, beginning in her 20s, is a reporter and fact-checker in the American cut-throat arena of weekly newspaper wedding announcements and coverages. These are expensive weddings for the rich and famous.

Cate Doty combines the behind-the-scenes adventures and misadventures of wedding reporting with her own relationship situation, a bit about the history of wedding reporting, and some current events to place the couplings in historical and political contexts.

‘People lie,’ she says – and that’s why there is a fact-checking process, which many couples are not happy with. Their age, name, heritage, occupation, previous marriages, how famous they are … people stretch the truth or want to keep facts hidden. Is all this information important and necessary anyway?

Not only does fashion change over the years, so do wedding events as the industry evolves. She writes of the traditional and the weird, the pretty and the pretty absurd, and the wedding annulment the next day!

This book is a mini-memoir that is light and readable, funny and witty, and honest about her own coming-of-age experiences as she navigates her coming-of-marital-stage.

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MARTINA NICOLLS

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MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of: The Paris Residences of James Joyce (2020), Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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