Buzzkill: "The Happiest Day of Your Life" by Katherine Damm (Best American Short Stories 2024)

"The Happiest Day of Your Life" is a little too successful in its realism for my taste, in that it is a story about a wedding that is almost as boring as an actual wedding. We follow Wyatt as he gets drunk fast and deeply at the wedding of his wife's ex-boyfriend. Wyatt looks around for his wife, Nina, and failing to find her, gets drunker, interacts with guests, makes the bride's family run interference to try to get him off the dance floor where he is annoying everyone, and thinks about the meaning of life and which of Nina's exes he likes the most. 

The story contrasts the dreams of happiness that weddings--especially the modern American versions of them--represent compared to the reality. Not necessarily the reality of horrible divorce, but more like the reality of one person knowing that he was the one she chose when she wasn't short of options, so how does he live up to the responsibility of being the one she chose? Or how choosing someone might mean loving them deeply but also finding out they have serious mental illness issues that will make life different from now on. 

It isn't without its sweetness, but about halfway through I felt as tired of Wyatt's drunken antics as the wedding party. The story is mostly very closely following Wyatt's point of view and getting deeply inside his head, so it relies on Wyatt's head being an interesting place to make the story work. I found it an interesting place for about two songs. This is one of those stories that a lot of writers have probably thought to write or actually written. Most people have been to weddings, and weddings nowadays are kind of silly and kitsch and grossly wasteful and also a bit sweet. They're kind of out-of-body experiences, and every writer who's at one is probably writing in their head. But because it's a story that has occurred to everyone, there's a lot on a writer to make their wedding story be worth being the one that everyone reads. 

Damm has strong powers of observation and lively language. I'm sure I'd like other stories of hers, but this one seemed like she was turning her powers of observation on a setting and theme I didn't think really took me anywhere new. I am typically as bored by the act of talking about why I didn't like a story as I am reading the story itself, so moving on to the next one. 

See also: Karen Carlson's take on the story, the best part of which is her take on the use of I Corinthians 13 in the story.