SPOILER ALERT: Some of the questions/answers below reveal parts of the plot. If you feel it’s important that you not know what happens before reading The Wedding Machine, bookmark this page and come back after finishing the book.

WOF:       Do you have personal experience with a “wedding machine?”

BETH:      Yes, definitely! It’s inspired by my mom and her group of friends. When the title came up my husband and I were having friends over for dinner; this particular friend is from Gastonia, NC (I’m from Greenville, SC) and we were comparing wedding stories. My friend was saying how Southern women get together and make things happen. My husband was saying “When we got married it was like this machine kicked into place: somebody did the flowers, somebody did the baking, somebody did the gift display . . . It was like a machine, a wedding machine.” My friend said, “That would be a great title for a book, you should write about the wedding machine.” That’s kind of where it came from.

My mom and her group of friends plan all the social events in the town where I’m from. They each have a role to play. They’re all best buddies, but they keep secrets sometimes from one another. Occasionally they’ll withhold some special linens or certain flowers for their own daughters’ events.

WOF:       The descriptions of the various weddings and parties are just gorgeous! Are you a decorator/flower arranger/party planner in your spare time? Or is that just part of the fun of writing fiction?

BETH:      Not at all, no. I’m just not that domestic. I hope maybe I can afford a wedding planner one day when my daughter gets married. Hopefully my mother will still be around to do it! I researched a lot of southern wedding books, but really I gleaned most of my information from my mom and her friends. They have all these notebooks and pictures. They know every kind of flower and how to arrange it. I love details; I think details really make the fictional world convincing. I do a lot of research, especially about flora and fauna and food and flowers.

WOF:       How do you begin a story? Is it with an idea, a character, a setting . . . ?

BETH:      I usually begin with the characters. To me that’s the heart of the story. I need to know each of the main characters. It takes about three months to sort of get to know each of them. I think about their childhood, where they’ve come from, what happened to them when they were three, what’s their best moment, what’s the most horrible thing that’s happened to them . . . It’s like they become your best friend and they’re beside you all the time. They just come to life. That’s one of the amazing, miraculous things — they really become real.

I start with a deep sense of the characters and an initial conflict. Then I don’t really know where the whole trajectory will go. I have a feeling and a sense of how I want it to end and I know the characters and the initial problem, but I have no idea of all the little plots along the way to get there. That’s part of the fun for me because the characters really take the reins of the story and start to tell you where they want to go and what they want to do. It’s sort of a surprise for me, which is part of the thrill of it.

WOF:       As we read through the book we see the world from the viewpoint of various characters. In real life, if you had the opportunity to see yourself and the events of your life through the eyes of those around you, would you?

BETH:      Ooh, that’s a really good question! Depends on who it is . . . I’d love to see what somebody else thinks of something I go through. I’d love to hear somebody else’s perspective (who sees me from the outside). We all have blind spots; I’d love to see what my flaws are. That’s what makes real characters, if you give them flaws. They can’t be perfect — in order to be human they have to have something that’s sympathetic, that you like about them, but certainly some fatal flaws as well. Hence the need for a Savior.

WOF:       Change happens, whether we want it to or not. How does the way each of the gals reacts to change tell us about their character?

BETH:      In general — especially Ray (who forms the emotional core of the book) and Hilda — they resist change. It’s more of a struggle for them to watch their daughters grow up and pick mates who wouldn’t necessarily be their first choice. Especially in the south in small towns, change is very difficult on people. They’re very set in their ways. They’ve passed down the culture and rites of passage and the way social events are done from generation to generation. It’s really difficult when the outside world tends to creep in and people from far away with lots of money come in and buy their houses and development happens. My parent’s generation, the baby boomers in the south, they tended to come back home and make the same life their parents did. But now my generation, the Gen X generation, left. A lot of them went out to the northeast, went out west, made other lives in other places. That’s really hard. My mother and her friends think, “Who are we going to pass these traditions down to? Everyone’s gone.”

WOF:       Ray has a secret stash — of gardenias, of all things. But it’s more than just a bush behind the shed; gardenias aren’t the only things she’s hiding, are they? How do the things we hide shape our characters?

BETH:      That’s one of the messages I wanted to get across in the novel. She [Ray] has lived her life in fear of being found out, that she’s not really from Charleston from this particular family, but just the housekeeper’s daughter. She fears that her husband and friends won’t care for her the way they do, when in fact they’ve known all along and they don’t care. They’re just so happy to have her come into their lives in this insulated town. She lives with these secrets and can’t relax and be fully herself. She can’t experience the joy she ought to have with a loving husband, a stable marriage, and strong, deep friendships. By the end of the book she faces that. Hopefully her quality of life significantly increases.

WOF:       At the end of the book, a number of situations have been resolved . . . but not all. Should we expect to see the ladies of Jasper, SC again?

BETH:      I don’t know . . . I don’t think so. I’ve already started on my next book and I tend to just start something new. I don’t wrap things up — in some ways this has been a criticism and some people like this — but I don’t wrap everything up perfectly. I feel the reader is entitled to see some amount of resolution, but in my mind the stories keep going on and on and on. This is just one moment in time in their lives that is important.

I give a sense of hope. Like Hilda — she’s the one in hiding all this time. She does finally come out at the end. You have a little bit of hope that if she made it out once she’ll come out again. I think that’s the way real life is. I really try to show a true depiction of real life.

WOF:       What are you working on now?

BETH:      I’ve just started my 4th novel; it’s about marriage. I’ve done weddings, now I’m moving to marriage. It’s about three marriages that are on verge of falling apart, people in their mid- to late- thirties. Which ones make it and which ones don’t. They’re all tied together; it’s two sisters and a cousin. It’s really about marriage and commitment, what destroys marriage and what can sustain it in a difficult time.