Colleen Curran

In Altared: 27 Writers Tell the Truth About Bridezillas, Bewilderment, Big Love, Breakups, and What Women Really Think About Contemporary Weddings Colleen Curran presents a fantastic collection of essays by and for modern women that invite readers to examine the meaning of weddings and marriage. I was never one of those girls who knew from the age of 5 what I wanted my wedding to be like, so when I read this a few weeks before my wedding, I found it to be a refreshing change from the tulle- show more and satin-covered world of wedding planning. The feminist perspectives presented in Altared bring to light the history behind many traditional wedding elements and suggest modern alternatives for the bride who cares more about being true to herself and her future husband than about making everyone else happy. The writers also share stories that illustrate the importance of remembering that a wedding is one day, while a marriage is (hopefully) a lifetime and keeping things in perspective. I recognized myself in these women's voices and felt reassured that I was not the only bride who didn't end every sentence with an exclamation point, obsess over finding the perfect shade of red, and live, eat, and breathe wedding planning. The essays in this collection are funny, sad, honest, and authentic. I've recommended Altared to friends both married and single, and I think it should be required reading for any bride-to-be. 4 out of 5.

If you liked Altared, you'd also enjoy One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding by Rebecca Mead. show less

A nice balance of scenarios by some very entertaining writers. A pretty safe book as a gift for the newly-engaged, in that it's all happy endings. Even the person who calls off the wedding seemed to do it for the right reasons and now be at peace with it. One writer wasn't particularly likable and things were going badly, but that appeared to be how she prefers things. Janelle Brown's piece on the wedding registry made me laugh out loud (and cringe with recognition) several times. I would show more have preferred more than one piece on wedding food, but Julie Powell did a great job with it. Of course. Overall, the strongest pieces were in the final section. Wow but Princess Di comes up a lot. I'm old enough to remember the wedding but we didn't watch it and I always thought she looked over-poofed. But it certainly influenced my generation. Martha makes many appearances as well, naturally, and induces similarly mixed feelings. Not a lot of serious in-depth grad student discussion of materialism and gender roles, but you still end up thinking about what you'd want to do yourself and -- most importantly -- why. show less

Very juvenile and kind of depressing. But I liked it. Curran's writing style is breathless and evocative and I probably would have tried to imitate her style had I discovered her during my creative writing college days.
The story is about three teenage girls and they're wild high school lives....everything you think will happen, happens. But Curran's writing style makes it worthwhile, I think.

A wildly uneven but engrossing story of bad girls in the late 1980's. Enough parallels with my own tarnished high school career that I stuck it out. Curran has a lot of promise, I think. Her writing is very vivid, very intense, but she tends to telegraph the upcoming plot twists a little too clearly.