(courtesy Macmillan Publishers)
Fiction is, strictly speaking, the stuff of make believe and imagination, of dreamt up people and not even a shred of coincidence between people living and those who have most certainly shuffled off this mortal coil.
But the truth is, and any writer will tell you, that it is always informed to some extent by what you know and the life you have lived, and so, made up or not, a novel always resonates with the truth of the human experience in ways quite particular to one person or group, or universal relatable.
Never has this reviewer felt the truth of that more than when reading Big Gay Wedding by Byron Lane, a book which possesses an almost playful, whimsically mischievous title and a premise that is all hysterical farce and hilarious home truths but which, when the narrative very much gets going, is one of the most truth-filled, heartfelt and wonderfully rich and lovely books you will ever read.
One of the advance reviewers of the book, whose tight, brief blurb adorns the back of the hardcover edition of the book, Kate Russo (Super Host) likens Lane’s frothily funny but emotionally weighty gem to Schitt’s Creek, a show which gave us an ensemble of wacky and strange characters who just happened to have a better handle on life than those who sit laudably in the well-approved mainstream.
But isn’t that the way of weirdos and misfits (and yes, as a lifelong gay outsider, I count myself especially among that glorious number) – because they have spent so much time on the outside looking in, they know, often but not always, which way is up, which is down and how to navigate all the messy bits in the middle.
Barnett reaches for a piece of frozen broccoli, and Chrissy reaches as well, in her mind, for help, for a coconspirator, one with awards, one as protective as her. ‘Leave it for me,’ Chrissy says, ‘ I’ll take care of all this mess.’
And, even if they don’t know how to sort all the detail because they are, after all, human like everyone else and who has an absolute lock on the small, messy parts of life in-between the big punctuation points of living, they at least understand some key truths that might otherwise evade those who sits unthinkingly in the safe and much-trafficked middle.
Like Chrissy During, a wonderful, bighearted woman who runs a farm for rescue animals own her property about an hour outside of New Orleans and who welcomes seemingly endless busloads of school kids for some restorative one-on-one time with animals her beloved Louisiana [something] sheep Elaine and a cast of other critters named after characters from the likes of Seinfeld, Frasier and Cheers.
She’s a good woman but she’s also a devoted lifelong Catholic and while she’s thought through great many other things in life, she’s always responded to the fact that her only child Barnett is gay with trepidation and fear, consumed by a sense that though she loves him dearly, that everyone she longed and dreamed for will never come to pass.
Her love, she realises later is conditional; she doesn’t mean for it to be but it is, and when Barnett returns home after 16 years in Los Angeles, which she adorably if scornfully refers to as a “Loony Tunes”, she confronted with how she’s going to handle the fact that her son is engaged to the delightfully oddball Ezra, a teacher and heir to a fortune, who is set to marry the one living man she loves above all others (her beloved husband John, who loved his son but not, definitely not, his homosexuality, has been dead a few years as Big Gay Wedding plays out).
(courtesy official Byron Lane Instagram)
Not only is Barnett engaged, however, BUT he also wants to get married posthaste and forthwith, and preferably on the family farm which presents all kinds of logistical difficulties, Chrissy-inspired complications and a circus of oddball personalities such as Ezra’s alcoholically loud socialite mother, and his event planning sister who decide that what conservative southern Louisiana needs is the biggest, gayest, Celine Dion in a water dunking tank wedding anyone has ever seen.
Chrissy however isn’t so sure; in fact, she’s very much not sure at first, and while Big Gay Wedding lets loose with tons of zany, comedic gold as the seemingly unstoppable forces of social progress come hard up against well-entrenched belief, it is also possessed of a great deal of well thought out rumination on the close, enduring bonds between mother and son, of the joy of finding out as a gay man that love and marriage can be yours and that it is more precious and wonderful than you could ever have dreamed, and that even the darkest of sentiments can be overcome by the power of love that never loses sight of what really matters.
For a novel with a sassily silly title, Big Gay Wedding has the kind of incisively surefooted thoughtfulness and emotional insightfulness that many more serious books lack, and it has, on the day of the wedding, which yes does come to pass but not until a lot of soul searching has been done by Chrissy, Barnett and a good many others, one of the BEST shutdown of homophobes, courtesy of an accidentally sober Victoria, Ezra’s mother, that you will ever read ANYWHERE (think of all the things you’ve ever wanted to say to bigots and it’s there in sparkling Oscar Wilde-an prose that will make your heart sing and make you leap from wherever you’re reading with a happily throaty “HELL YEAH!”).
They embrace and separate, and as her son walks out of the barn, out of her life, Chrissy touches her broken heart and whispers to herself, ‘There it is.’
I love you unconditionally. Those were his exact words.
He’s right, she thinks. He loves unconditionally. And I do not.
What really hits home, and hits home with effervescent humour and hard-hitting truthfulness, in Big Gay Wedding is how much truth this gloriously good serving of fiction has bursting from every glitter-accented seam.
Whether you’re a member of LGBTQIA+ community or not, or whether you’re a proud family member of close friend of one, Big Gay Wedding is a beautifully honest picture of what coming out is often like, and how it can take a while for those who aren’t gay or lesbian etc to really comprehend that their loved one’s sexuality is not some whim or worse a sin but rather who they really, intrinsically, inviolably and forever are.
Reading about Chrissy and Barnett’s journey, which is shown with warmth, good humour and a considerable amount of relatable angst, is to appreciate what it is like for so many people in their position and how sometimes the love can get lost, albeit temporarily, in the confusion about what is what in a world that is nothing like religious teachings or conservative may have led many to believe.
The truth of how divergent the reality of life and what many people choose to believe about it, is embodied with gutsy, unapologetic chutzpah by Barnett’s Paw-Paw (his grandfather) who remonstrates with Chrissy at one point about not wholeheartedly embracing her gay son by pointing that, at some point, someone said rats are evil, squirrels are cute, but when you come down to it, they are both just animals.
It may seem like a frivolous analogy but like so much in this beautifully, riotously funny book, the centrepiece of which is a wedding anyone with a heart and love of drag bars and firefly illumination would LOVE to attend, is strikes home with the power and conviction that comes from the expression of innate truth.
It’s impossible to read Big Gay Wedding and not give your heart to Barnett and Chrissy, Ezra and his family, and indeed the whole wacky but lovingly intense community of Made, Louisiana who come too embody the heart-thrillingly restorative idea that “love is love” in a book that is sparklingly, laugh out loud funny, soul-searingly insightful and beautifully heartwarming, all wrapped up in the kind of wish fulfilment and happiness that everyone who’s ever been on the outside, or knows someone who has, should be party to, and which should be theirs, unchallenged by bigots and the hateful (who by the way are treated in unexpectedly forgiving ways) as long as they shall live.