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Well, another month is here, and another chance to do your background reading for Nicole and Emily’s rambling gchats about literature is upon us. We’ll be discussing CASSANDRA AT THE WEDDING, by Dorothy Baker. As always, you can find your discount code at the bottom of this post, and you have a couple of weeks to get your shit together and read the book. Now, what’s the deal with this one? Emily says it’s a beach read, but with overdoses and sexual identity crises! “Fun in the sun!”

Cassandra at the Wedding is about Cassandra, the witty, high-maintenance, suicidal, gay identical twin of conventional, practical, family-minded Judith. The twins, after a period of creepily-extreme intimacy that lasted into their early twenties, have gone their separate ways, but now they’re reuniting at their family’s California ranch for Judith’s wedding, an intimate family affair that Cassandra is bound to ruin one way or another. In sections that alternate masterfully between the twins’ voices, Dorothy Baker reveals the inner workings of the kind of family a female Wes Anderson might invent: rich, weird, literate, boozy and tilting glamorously but darkly out of control. Originally published in 1962, the book illustrates and subverts the conventions of its time, while anticipating, in Cassandra, literary anti-heroines who were soon to join her ranks.

Well, we’re game. Let’s do this.

Readers of The Toast can take 20% off purchases from Emily Books — subscriptions or individual books — by entering the code CASSIETOAST at checkout until 8/15.