If Ophelia Cohen learned one thing from her parents, it’s that getting married is a bad idea. But if she’s learning anything from her widowed mother’s dementia, it’s that dying alone is worse. So when she meets Luke — the man of her mother’s dreams — marriage suddenly doesn’t seem so crazy.
But none of Ophelia’s obsessive scrolling on wedding forums can prepare her for the nightmare of planning her own. Why is her mother-in-law going crazy over every detail? Why is Luke’s family so eager to host the wedding in their vineyard’s ancient chapel? And what exactly will Ophelia have to sacrifice if she and her mother both hope to survive her special day?
Shot through with wicked humor, pitch-black horror, and unexpected romance, Until Death is a deliciously dark and funny send-up of the wedding industrial complex—and a mother-daughter story unlike any you’ve read before.
1. When it comes to wedding planning, your spreadsheets will not save you.
Fun fact: I had not yet planned a wedding when I wrote this book. I wasn’t even engaged. So, for research, I relied heavily on that bastion of first-person accounts, Wedding Reddit.
Before Wedding Reddit, I would have assumed that the worst parts of wedding planning were the organization and the expense. Most people are not simply born with high-level, large-scale event-planning skills, which is, you know, a whole career that requires experience and training. Still, I would have guessed that with budgeting and organization — a spreadsheet, maybe a three-ring binder or two — you could circumvent that problem and come out relatively unscathed.
Nay, nay. As I discovered through hundreds of firsthand accounts — and as my protagonist, Ophelia, discovers, through myriad run-ins with her terrible in-laws — the horrific parts of wedding planning aren’t the parts that can be solved with a spreadsheet. Hell Is Other People.
2. The symptoms of dementia stretch far beyond memory loss.
My protagonist’s mother has dementia, and my protagonist becomes her full-time caretaker. (This is still a fun book, I promise!) My own mother does not have dementia — we joke that she’s not going to get it, because she’s going to have to remember everything — but when I was a teenager, I witnessed close-up what it meant for her to care for her own mother through the illness. For a long time, I didn’t even realize it was an illness. I thought that dementia and aging were synonymous. I didn’t realize there was a way to get old without losing your body and your mind.
Because I was so young, and because I didn’t really know what I was looking at, and because I didn’t provide the bulk of my grandmother’s care, I thought the dementia was the same as the forgetting. I didn’t recognize all the other symptoms: wandering (oh, so that’s why Nanny tried to walk to her sister-in-law’s house at two o’clock in the morning!), aggression (there is an excellent memoir, Slow Dancing with a Stranger by Meryl Comer, that talks about this), agitation, sundowning, mood shifts. It’s all really quite devastating. Considering how many of us, God willing, grow old and need to either provide or accept some type of dementia care, I’m shocked that as a society, we don’t have better care systems in place.
3. Pennsylvania has some great wine country!
I already knew, to a limited extent, of the existence of Pennsylvania’s wine country. This is thanks not to my book, but to the spotted lanternfly.
The spotted lanternfly is an insect indigenous to China and Vietnam. I assume it’s harmless over there, but here, it’s very invasive. If you live on what I think of as the “Amtrak Northeast Corridor” section of the continental United States, you will know all about the pernicious threat of the spotted lanternfly. And, a few years ago, when we finally managed, for once in our sorry lives, to march in lockstep as a society to stamp those buggers out, part of the messaging was that we had to kill the spotted lanternflies because otherwise they would threaten Pennsylvania wine country… which implied the existence of Pennsylvania wine country.
So I knew we had it, technically. But I didn’t know it was so nice! I spent a long time researching Lancaster wineries for this book, and by my count, there are at least seven wineries within or around Lancaster County, an area otherwise mostly famed for its Amish quilts and Dutch Wonderland. Not to advertise, but they also have some cute hotels.
4. There are a lot of patron saints for women in terrible relationships.
This book is very Catholic.
I grew up Catholic myself, and I knew that if I was going to do a good job on a book about a wedding, the wedding in question would be a Catholic one. So the vineyard at which the wedding takes place has its own haunted Catholic chapel.
Originally, I also had a whole bit where the Stations of the Cross (IYKYK) had been replaced by hand-carved panels of a series of female saints. Those panels are no longer in the book. But I learned about the saints nonetheless. Saint Godelieve, patron saint of those with abusive in-laws! Saint Helena, patron saint of abandoned wives! Saint Wilgefortis, patron saint of women who wish to be liberated from their terrible husbands! All of them died in progressively more excruciating ways, but they live in on Catholic art, and in the third draft of my novel, which will not see the light of day.
5. Your family will still love you.
This is a novel about a woman with some similar biographical details to mine, who is having a very, very difficult time with her mother.
To be clear, my real-life mother is lovely and supportive. At the time of this writing, she has made plans to drive all up and down the Eastern Seaboard to kvell over me while I talk to crowds about the terrible mother in my book. But three years ago, when I sat down to write this novel, I really thought she would read it and stop speaking to me. In the middle of drafting the first chapter, I fumbled around for a realistic detail, and I landed on my real-life mother’s real-life injured knee. And a sort of gentle background dread rose up within me. I thought, Oh, shit. This is going to be the one that makes it.
That dread expanded and solidified as I injected more details into this frankly bombastic book about an evil vineyard and a shitty fiancé. My mother’s jewelry. My father’s secular Jewish heritage. My partner’s haircut. My mother’s nickname for me. My father’s wire-rimmed glasses. My partner’s very specific career.
Unfortunately, I don’t know of a better way to make the made-up stuff feel real than to hang it on real details. I think of myself kind of like a magician sawing a woman in half: the woman is real, the box is real, but obviously no one’s been cut in half.
But I could see how somebody could be confused.
So I was terrified that my mother — or, if not her, then somebody; my father, my partner, some random cousin, somebody — would read this book and think I had slandered my whole family in a public forum. That by writing and publishing this novel, I would destroy the relationships that meant the most to me.
Obviously that has not happened. I made that fear up. And what’s more, I’ve expressed this fear to other writers; and it turns out to be a very common fear, and almost — not quite all, but almost — all of us just made it up. It wasn’t true.
The people who love us love us. Love is not conditional. And actually, now that I’m looking back — I think that’s a lesson Ophelia learns, too.
Mary Berman is a Philadelphia-based writer. She earned her MFA in creative writing from the University of Mississippi, and she also holds a BA in writing seminars from Johns Hopkins University. Her short works have been published in Cicada, PseudoPod, Fireside, and elsewhere. Until Death is her debut novel.
Mary Berman: Website | Newsletter
Until Death: Bookshop.org | Amazon | B&N | Kobo | Mary’s local indie bookstore
