In the spring of 2017, Amanda Pendolino ’07 found herself in the middle of a self-described “wedding whirlwind.” Not only was she the maid of honor for both her sister and her best friend, she was attending several other friends’ weddings. But rather than fall into a matrimonial stupor, Pendolino started making mental notes about what she saw.

The result is Wedding Planning for the Busy Feminist, which was published last May. In the book, Pendolino—who is not married—takes an outsider’s view of planning a wedding and expertly straddles the line between irreverent and practical. “I tell the readers to think of me as their unofficial maid of honor,” Pendolino said, “while I try to guide them through this process.”

“It seems like so much of wedding culture is kind of at odds with itself,” she continued. “On the one hand, you have women who are getting married much later in life, and who don’t see a wedding as the center of their lives. But on the other, they’re getting a lot of pressure from social media to have a ‘perfect’ wedding.”

So while the book contains plenty of practical advice, such as a timeline and money-saving tips, it’s also driven strongly by a mantra that Pendolino repeats several times in the first few pages: You do you.

“I interviewed dozens of married people for this book and sent out surveys to many others, and I wanted to highlight some of the funny things I’d seen that showcased the couples’ personality,” she said. “One couple had someone painting their wedding as it occurred. I’d never seen that before.”

Pendolino has been living in Los Angeles since shortly after graduating from Ithaca in 2007 and has worked as a freelance writer, screenwriter, and script reader. She credits her semester spent in the college’s Los Angeles internship program as helping with the transition. “There’s a community of IC people out here, and that’s great,” she said. “I don’t know if I’d have been as comfortable coming here without that.”

And although Pendolino’s book has taken her in a different direction than her scriptwriting background, it did influence one aspect of the process: her decision to self-publish. “As a screen - writer, if you sell a script, you don’t often have control of what the final product is going to look like,” she said. “So by self-publishing, I was able to maintain that control, and see my original ideas in print. It’s a great feeling.”