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We Are Gathered Here Today - Hardcover

Finger, Bobby

 
9798217045976: We Are Gathered Here Today
Hardcover
ISBN 13: 9798217045976
Verlag: Penguin Putnam Inc, 2026

Inhaltsangabe

The Wedding People meets The Celebrants in this hilarious and profound novel about a recently engaged gay man second guessing marriage, and his cousin’s chaotic Texas wedding weekend with old friends and unexpected strangers that will help guide him to the truth, from the beloved author of The Old Place.

At 36, Finlay Hightower has attended countless incredible, cringe-worthy, and disastrous wedding celebrations with his best friends. Their secret to surviving wedding chaos? The Hour of Disrespect—a pact to reserve judgement to one hour after the couple’s Big Day, protecting the wedding glow and leaving only with the good memories.

But this next wedding will test their decade-old tradition in more ways than one. Now, one of their own is getting married—Fin’s beloved cousin, Elaine—at a Wild West-themed venue in the sweltering Texas summer heat that is as meticulously itineraried as it is kitchy. Reserving opinions won’t be easy, and on top of that Fin has a secret that threatens his officiant duties: he’s just gotten engaged to the man of his dreams, and a sense of unease has him questioning if he believes in the institution of marriage at all.

As Fin joins the rambunctious and increasingly unhinged “queer table”, old friendships are tested and new relationships are formed. Will each guest hold back their particular views on love, commitment, and the wedding before Elaine can say “I do”? And if not, could those confessions ultimately give Fin the courage to uncover his truth?

Like any good wedding, We Are Gathered Here Today is funny, heartfelt, and full of surprises. Like any terrible wedding, it’s something you’ll never forget.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Bobby Finger is the author of The Old Place and Four Squares, and cohost of the popular celebrity and entertainment podcast, Who? Weekly. A Texas native, he lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his husband and cat.

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1.

The frequency of receiving wedding invitations had slowed down just as everything else in Fin's life seemed to be speeding up. Algorithmically recommended content displayed on every app installed on his phone constantly reminded him that time moved faster as you got older, not that he needed a stranger's insistence for him to notice something so grimly, crushingly obvious. The planet was getting hotter more quickly. The threat of fascism was rising. Even the lines around his eyes were deepening over time, a fairly recent change that made Fin realize his own vanity was dwindling quicker than he ever predicted it would. So much was happening all of the time, so little of it could be ignored, and the gravest irony was how quickly everyone-himself included-was able to forget. Minds could only hold so much information, Fin often thought, and at some point in the past ten years the human brain had reached its biological limit. Old data was forcefully purged in order to make room for new entries, and in just under a decade his and everyone else's brains had transformed into perpetually revolving doors that took in new visitors as swiftly as they spit old ones out. There had to be a reason for the way everyone was feeling, he decided, and it might as well be that.

Well before the great quickening, weddings were a balm to Fin because they were a pause. A time to sit at a big round table with the past, present, and future, holding all three tight before they inevitably went back to where they belonged. That they were also a place to hear "I Wanna Dance with Somebody" in its most satisfying, hopeful context was the icing on the fondant on the cake. To Fin, leaving a wedding-even a terrible one-was always a moment of profound, all-encompassing sadness. A wedding bouquet ascended into a world at a standstill and was caught in fast-forward. But, oh, what it felt like for a wedding to begin-especially a wedding weekend. The gift of stretched-out time was, to the wedding guest, greater than any KitchenAid mixer or honeymoon-fund contribution could be to the wedding couple, and more meaningful than any speech or heartfelt, handwritten card. For Finlay Hightower, it was one that opened itself the moment his plane touched down on the weekend of his cousin Elaine's wedding. He'd spent the morning moving at five hundred miles an hour, and with the piercing screech of rubber on tarmac, he'd abruptly come to a complete stop.

The flight arrived ten minutes early, after one full The Devil Wears Prada and roughly one-third of The Fugitive-post-bus crash but before anyone actually believes Dr. Richard Kimble's wife was killed by a one-armed man. Fin transferred the unopened novel he'd bought at a LaGuardia Hudson News and the empty notebook he'd packed-with the sole purpose of filling it with his officiant speech-from the seat pocket to his backpack. He quickly disembarked the plane, grimacing at the instant oppressiveness of the central Texas heat he'd escaped over fifteen years ago that pierced through the gaps of the jet bridge before inhaling it deeply and deciding it was, actually, not that bad every once in a while. He pulled out his phone and sent a text to Jacque, his closest friend, who'd also been forged in fire.

Here! No bags! Terminal A!

I think I literally watched your plane land. Leaving
the cell phone lot shortly. Pee now if you have to.
I come bearing snacks and drinks for the
ride so we won't have to stop.

Fin smiled at her thoughtfulness. Jacque Aguilar. Funnier, smarter, sillier, kinder, and easier to love than he, she was his favorite person to be in a car with. He didn't miss driving, and often pointed out New York City's mostly efficient public transportation system as the fundamental reason he could never see himself living anywhere else, but he did miss riding shotgun with Jacque at the wheel. During their time in college in the mid-aughts, back when gas was cheap, they'd often just hop in her Chevrolet Cavalier and go for a drive. From Austin to New Braunfels and back, stopping for snacks and soda somewhere in between, or toward Johnson City in the Hill Country. Sometimes they'd just loop around the city, from I-35 to Ben White, north on MoPac, and 183 back toward the highway. It was a time for them to relax and to catch up on the day, divulge their latest unrequited crushes, and with any luck, grab dinner at the end of Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, a busy intersection in Austin's east side with their favorite fast food filling every quadrant. A little Popeyes, a little Taco Cabana, and a Frosty from Wendy's, eaten together in the final choice's parking lot before returning to the apartment complex where they shared a staircase and a wall, tucked into a million sprawling live oak trees that, he figured now, had probably been ripped out of the ground to make way for a high-rise.

When the window rolled down he saw the Styrofoam cup first; Jacque held it over the passenger seat, shaking it slightly, tauntingly, as if it were a beverage he was forbidden from ever tasting. She was in a T-shirt and shorts, the same as he, and her long black hair was pulled into a crisp, shiny ponytail held by a white tie. "Welcome to hell," she said, finally revealing her face from behind the cup as the cold escaped through the window. "I got it sweet, because I knew you wouldn't have ordered it that way yourself."

Jacque was right about the sugar because she tended to be right about everything involving Fin. Since they'd met due to a militant tenth-grade English teacher's unwavering semester-long seating chart, during which they began passing notes back and forth to each other with sleights of hand that made them both feel like David Copperfield, she had him all figured out. When he came out to her the following year, while thumbing a wall of DVDs at Hollywood Video and desperately avoiding any and all eye contact, she congratulated him for finally working up the nerve, and then, to his shock, proceeded to come out herself. "But what about Manny?" he said after she used the word "lesbian," referring to her on-again/off-again who had graduated the previous year.

"Manny's just a dildo with a disgusting man attached," she said, pulling a copy of Under the Tuscan Sun from the wall. "Plus, the only other dykes around here don't know they're dykes, and I don't want to be any closet case's first. Second, sure. That's fun. But not first."

Just before heading up to Austin for college, he came out to a second person: his beloved second cousin Elaine, with whom he shared a sibling-like friendship that, while close, lacked the unburdened freedom that he could have with someone outside of his family-someone like Jacque. It never felt worthwhile to tell his parents, whom he assumed already knew, or his other high school friends, none of whom he cared about all that much. They were straight women, most of them, and he feared the conversations that would ensue from any kind of dramatic sit-down event. They would be too excited, perhaps grimly so, and worse, they may even make it about themselves. He feared the why didn't you tell mes or I always suspecteds and every reaction in between, so he swerved himself away from such conversations entirely. In college-ninety miles away in the liberal, notably "weird" city of Austin-he would be gay from the jump, a man crisply, confidently defined, and his life would finally begin. Not anew, exactly, as Elaine and Jacque would be right there beside him: perpetual reminders of his past, the only friends who had the privilege of knowing his prologue, and the only ones who seemed to give more than half a shit about all the chapters that would be written later.

He made other friends in college, of course....

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Verlag
Penguin Putnam Inc
Erscheinungsdatum
2026
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 13 
9798217045976
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
336
Kontakt zum Hersteller
G.P. Putnam's Sons
https://www.penguin.com/putnam/

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