People often ask me if Always a Bridesmaid (For Hire) is a true story.

The short answer is yes.

The longer answer is that when I sat down to write the book, I wasn’t trying to write a business memoir or a wedding guide. I was trying to make sense of one of the strangest chapters of my life. A few years earlier, I had posted a Craigslist ad offering myself as a bridesmaid for complete strangers. I thought it was a funny idea, the kind of thing you’d tell your friends about over drinks and laugh about a week later. I never imagined it would become a career, let alone a book.

But life has a funny way of rewarding the ideas that make the least amount of sense.

When the ad went viral, everything changed. Reporters started calling. Brides started emailing. Complete strangers trusted me with some of the most important days of their lives. Before I fully understood what was happening, I had accidentally created Bridesmaid for Hire, a business that would take me across the country and place me in the middle of hundreds of weddings, family dramas, friendship challenges, and unforgettable moments.

For years, people focused on the novelty of the job. They wanted to know if being a professional bridesmaid was real. They wanted to know how much people paid me, whether the weddings were awkward, and what happened when someone hired a stranger to stand beside them on one of the biggest days of their life. Those questions made sense, but they missed what fascinated me most. The real story was never about the business itself. The real story was always about the people.

Behind every wedding was a collection of human stories. There were brides questioning whether they were making the right decision. There were friendships hanging by a thread. There were parents struggling to let go, siblings trying to reconnect, and people desperately trying to create a perfect day while carrying the weight of everything happening behind the scenes. The longer I worked as a professional bridesmaid, the more I realized I wasn’t learning about weddings. I was learning about relationships.

Eventually, I started keeping notes.

Not because I planned to write a book, but because I was afraid I would forget what I was witnessing. Every weekend seemed to produce another unbelievable story. There were moments so funny they felt scripted and moments so emotional they stayed with me long after I boarded a flight home. I kept thinking the same thing: nobody is ever going to believe this happened.

That’s when the idea for Always a Bridesmaid (For Hire) began to take shape.

The Moment I Realized I Had a Book

There wasn’t one wedding that convinced me to write a book.

There wasn’t a dramatic moment where I closed my laptop, stared out a rainy New York City window, and declared, “This is a memoir.”

It happened much more slowly than that.

At first, I was simply trying to keep up with my own life. Every weekend seemed to introduce me to a new cast of characters, a new city, and a new set of circumstances that somehow managed to be even stranger than the last. I’d board a plane on a Friday not knowing anyone involved in the wedding and come home on Sunday feeling like I’d lived an entire lifetime with people I had only met 48 hours earlier.

I started taking notes because I didn’t trust my memory.

The stories felt too unbelievable to remember accurately.

There was the bride who called me in tears because her maid of honor disappeared a few weeks before the wedding. There was the bridal party that communicated almost exclusively through passive-aggressive text messages. There were family members who hadn’t spoken in years but suddenly found themselves sitting together at rehearsal dinners trying to pretend everything was fine.

Then there were the moments that never make it into wedding albums.

The panic attacks.

The self-doubt.

The conversations in bathroom stalls.

The fears whispered five minutes before someone walked down the aisle.

The wedding industry does a wonderful job selling the highlight reel. It shows us the first dance, the beautiful flowers, the perfectly styled photographs, and the emotional vows. What it rarely shows are the hundreds of tiny moments that happen behind the scenes. The moments where people reveal who they really are.

As a professional bridesmaid, I had a front-row seat to all of it.

The more weddings I attended, the more I realized I wasn’t collecting wedding stories.

I was collecting human stories.

I met people at turning points in their lives. Some were excited. Some were terrified. Many were both at the same time. Weddings have a unique way of magnifying everything. Small disagreements become larger. Family tensions become more obvious. Personal insecurities become harder to ignore.

At the same time, weddings also reveal the best parts of people.

I watched friends travel across the country to support one another. I watched parents overcome differences for the sake of their children. I watched strangers show remarkable kindness when someone needed it most. For every story that made me laugh, there was another that reminded me how resilient people can be.

Eventually, my notebooks became impossible to ignore.

They were filled with observations, memories, funny moments, awkward moments, and lessons I didn’t want to lose. I would come home from a wedding, unpack my suitcase, and spend an hour writing down everything I could remember before the details faded away.

The more I wrote, the more a pattern started to emerge.

The story wasn’t really about becoming a professional bridesmaid.

The story was about what happened after.

It was about saying yes to an idea that sounded ridiculous and watching it completely reshape my life. It was about learning to trust myself when there was no roadmap. It was about building a business that nobody understood and discovering that sometimes the most meaningful opportunities are the ones that look the strangest from the outside.

That’s when I realized I had a book.

Not because I had attended enough weddings.

Not because the business had become successful.

Not because people kept asking questions.

I realized I had a book because I finally understood that the story wasn’t about weddings at all.

It was about taking a chance on an unconventional idea and discovering that the people you meet along the way often change you just as much as you change them.

That’s the story I wanted to tell in Always a Bridesmaid (For Hire).

And years later, it’s still the reason the book means so much to me.

Explore More

• The Story Behind Bridesmaid for Hire
• World’s First Professional Bridesmaid
• Always a Bridesmaid (For Hire)
• All My Friends Are Engaged
• Finally the Bride
• Books by Jen Glantz
• Bridesmaid for Hire in the Media
• About Jen Glantz
• 1-800-Bridesmaid
• BridesmaidForHire.com
• Amazon Author Page
• Goodreads Author Page