Supper Club

Supper Club by Lara Williams

When I close my eyes to summon up an image that could represent this book, what I see is a sumptuous cake, perhaps deep chocolate or red velvet with curls of chocolate and palatial structures of frosting as decoration. The cake is on a cake-stand, creating an effect of floating. Instead of a slice taken out, there is instead a furious, hungry maul made in the crumb, the kind of cavity made not with a knife or fork but with a hand or a mouth.

Supper Club chronicles the time from main character Roberta’s adolescence through her early thirties. Tracking backward and forward almost dreamily in time, scenes and narrative threads intersect and trouble one another: Roberta’s departure from home for college, where she is overwhelmed with both ambient anxiety and specific trauma; messages she receives from her long-absent father; Roberta’s lengthy relationship with an older professor; Roberta’s time working for a fashion website, where she meets Stevie, who becomes a life-altering friend.

There’s something about Stevie that catalyzes Roberta. Always interested in food and cooking, the appearance in her life of a friend who is powerful, supportive, funny, and a little wild inspires Roberta to start the Supper Club, a transgressive gathering of women where, rather than attempting to silence, suppress, and shrink themselves, the goal is to feast, expand, shout, and generally unleash in community. But this consciously bacchanalian presence in her life does not magically transform Roberta. She is still plagued with a sense of living for others, of directionless and rootlessness, of being sure that she is an inconvenience, a disappointment, a drag. I was frustrated by her ongoing refusal to communicate with the people around her, the people who attempted to love her, but also appreciated this realistic representation of what can so often be the thing that holds us back from transformation. Without communicating about her desires, her confusions, her sorrows, and her traumas, Roberta is left floating upon the cake-stand, in abundant possession of all potential riches and sustenance, but ungrounded and alone.