Hi Ali,
Wedding season hits its peak over the next eight weeks, and Glamour readers are about to re-enter what my client (author) Mo Fanning has come to think of as the comparison economy: hen weekends, table plans, and the eight-second forensic audit you perform on the woman opposite you at ‘the sit down’ when she mentions, “our place in Lisbon.”
I’d like to offer you a single 1,000-word humour essay by Mo for the Lifestyle pages, working title “Why the best friend at any wedding is the one you met at work.”
The argument: every wedding now functions as a public audit of our own lives – silently Spreadsheet-of-Doom-scoring ourselves across jobs, postcodes, partners, and whether we’ve “started thinking about” children (the most loaded phrase at any wedding, capable of detonating an entire table).
The piece’s turn is that the friend who saves us isn’t on any spreadsheet. She’s the one compiling her own spreadsheet across the table – and nine times out of ten, we didn’t choose her. We met her at work. We don’t choose our friends, the piece argues. We’re put in rooms with people… and the ones we still find funny on a Wednesday afternoon three years in are the ones we keep. Endurance is the binding agent.
Mo is the author of seven novels of warm, comic, character-driven fiction, with bylines in The Bookseller, BookBrunch, QX Magazine, She Reads and Female First. His new novel, Lisa Doyle Is Absolutely Fine (Spring Street Books, paperback ebook and audio, 18 June 2026), is a comedy about a woman who, four glasses into a bottle of wine, invents a fiancé called Brian to keep up with her best friend’s engagement – and then has to talk an actual Brian into standing by her side through hen weekends, parents’ dinners, and finally the wedding itself. It’s the same observational territory the essay sits in, but with no obligation on the piece to do anything except work as a piece.
The full draft is pasted below for ease. Print proof and press PDF, author photo, cover artwork and wedding-themed imagery all available on request – happy to send anything useful, and happy to tweak the angle, length or peg.
With thanks,
Adrian Bedford
for Mo Fanning
mofanning.co.uk
Lisa Doyle Is Absolutely Fine – Spring Street Books – paperback, ebook & audio – ISBN 978-1-068394-71-3
On follow-up: if she hasn’t replied in 7–10 working days, one short nudge is reasonable (“Bumping in case this slipped past — happy to revise the angle if it’s not quite right for you”). After that, leave it alone and pitch the next person on your list. Stylist’s Lifestyle desk would be the natural second call.