Book Club pick; Someone You Love Is Gone; Help! I’m Alive!; and The Wedding. A Simon Fraser University Writer’s Studio alumna hailed by the CBC as one of “Ten Canadian women writers you need to read,” Basran lives in Delta, BC, with her family.
She applied the Page 69 Test to The Wedding and shared the following:
On page 69 of The Wedding, the wealthy and entitled bride to be, Devi Dosanjh is at her make-up artist’s salon to review her wedding look and reception styling. She has asked her stylist to make a last-minute change to her original look since her “old Hollywood glam” idea has been stolen by another bride to be. As Devi sits in the salon chair, her mind wanders to social media, and the recent “Dear Auntie” advice giving influencer she’d anonymously contacted about her marital misgivings. While chatting with the stylist, she admires herself from every angle, happily noting that she looks nothing like herself and takes a selfie.Visit Gurjinder Basran's website.
Surprisingly this page does an amazing job of capturing the essence of the book. As the novel outlines the lead up to a wedding from fifteen different perspectives, the reader quickly sees that nothing is as it seems yet perceptions are everything. In a tight knit traditional Punjabi community where friends, relatives, and distant relations are constantly gossiping, watching, commenting, and criticizing each other’s lives, “what will people say?” is a common refrain and all the characters go to great lengths to hide their secrets lives to preserve tradition and honor cultural expectations. Long standing familial resentments, half-truths and personal compromises threaten the carefully curated lives of all involved. In a world of social comparison has perception become reality and is perception enough to build a life on? These are just some of the questions that page 69 asks, and that The Wedding answers.
Q&A with Gurjinder Basran.
My Book, The Movie: The Wedding.
--Marshal Zeringue
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