Genre Fiction
![Lara Williams - [object Object] author](https://res.cloudinary.com/readsomnia/image/upload/authors/a_a_lara_williams.jpg)
Supper Club
Named a Best Book of the Year:
Vogue * TIME * Real Simple * Kirkus Reviews
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice
For fans of Sally Rooney's Normal People: A sharply intelligent and intimate debut novel about a secret society of hungry young women who meet after dark and feast to reclaim their appetites--and their physical spaces--that posits the question: If you feed a starving woman, what will she grow into?
Roberta spends her life trying not to take up space. At almost thirty, she is adrift and alienated from life. Stuck in a mindless job and reluctant to pursue her passion for food, she suppresses her appetite and recedes to the corners of rooms. But when she meets Stevie, a spirited and effervescent artist, their intense friendship sparks a change in Roberta, a shift in her desire for more. Together, they invent the Supper Club, a transgressive and joyous collective of women who gather to celebrate, rather than admonish, their hungers. They gather after dark and feast until they are sick; they break into private buildings and leave carnage in their wake; they embrace their changing bodies; they stop apologizing. For these women, each extraordinary yet unfulfilled, the club is a way to explore, discover, and push the boundaries of the space they take up in the world. Yet as the club expands, growing in both size and rebellion, Roberta is forced to reconcile herself to the desire and vulnerabilities of the body--and the past she has worked so hard to repress. Devastatingly perceptive and savagely funny, Supper Club is an essential coming-of-age story for our times.
Vogue * TIME * Real Simple * Kirkus Reviews
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice
For fans of Sally Rooney's Normal People: A sharply intelligent and intimate debut novel about a secret society of hungry young women who meet after dark and feast to reclaim their appetites--and their physical spaces--that posits the question: If you feed a starving woman, what will she grow into?
Roberta spends her life trying not to take up space. At almost thirty, she is adrift and alienated from life. Stuck in a mindless job and reluctant to pursue her passion for food, she suppresses her appetite and recedes to the corners of rooms. But when she meets Stevie, a spirited and effervescent artist, their intense friendship sparks a change in Roberta, a shift in her desire for more. Together, they invent the Supper Club, a transgressive and joyous collective of women who gather to celebrate, rather than admonish, their hungers. They gather after dark and feast until they are sick; they break into private buildings and leave carnage in their wake; they embrace their changing bodies; they stop apologizing. For these women, each extraordinary yet unfulfilled, the club is a way to explore, discover, and push the boundaries of the space they take up in the world. Yet as the club expands, growing in both size and rebellion, Roberta is forced to reconcile herself to the desire and vulnerabilities of the body--and the past she has worked so hard to repress. Devastatingly perceptive and savagely funny, Supper Club is an essential coming-of-age story for our times.
Editorial Reviews
A New York Times Book Review Paperback Row Pick
"[Williams] decants her first novel into flights, like wine....Confer[s] dignity on the small, quotidian self-adjustments that women are always making in order to survive....This is one of Williams's strengths: an exquisite patience with the emerging texture of emotion. As a stylist, she is subtle and superbly attentive....But where Williams truly shines is, if you'll forgive me, in the kitchen. The food in the book eats you. (It literally changed my dinner plans.)...These interludes perfume the narrative, like aromatics in a stock, imparting a depth of flavor that resurfaces stylishly when you least expect it."-The New York Times Book Review
"The conceit of [Supper Club] is a bold and aggressively indelicate one that challenges society's expectations of women's appetites - for food, sex, pleasure, all of it....Delectable...Bursting with deep meditations on the lives of women and how they're shaped and distorted by men who are careless, monstrous and all points in between...Supper Club fascinates as an unflinching embrace of women and their many appetites and smashes the patriarchy with heaping plates of pasta."-USA Today
"[A] deliciously anarchic first novel about an ever-growing group of women who gather to indulge in the hedonistic freedom of acting unladylike. Topless feasts and Prosecco-soaked dancing abound."-O, The Oprah Magazine
"A riotous still life-turned-food fight…Williams's writing is decadent and lush, and the narrative avoids any pat resolutions for women frustrated by the way our bodies have been commodified by chocolate pushers and fitness gurus alike."-Vulture
"Stephanie Danler's Sweetbitter meets Donna Tartt's The Secret History in this story of female desire, friendship, lust, and, above all, hunger....This novel will alternately make you laugh, tear up, and text your group chat begging to start a wayward dining committee."-Vogue
"[A] daring debut...Williams' descriptions of consumption are at turns mo...
"[Williams] decants her first novel into flights, like wine....Confer[s] dignity on the small, quotidian self-adjustments that women are always making in order to survive....This is one of Williams's strengths: an exquisite patience with the emerging texture of emotion. As a stylist, she is subtle and superbly attentive....But where Williams truly shines is, if you'll forgive me, in the kitchen. The food in the book eats you. (It literally changed my dinner plans.)...These interludes perfume the narrative, like aromatics in a stock, imparting a depth of flavor that resurfaces stylishly when you least expect it."-The New York Times Book Review
"The conceit of [Supper Club] is a bold and aggressively indelicate one that challenges society's expectations of women's appetites - for food, sex, pleasure, all of it....Delectable...Bursting with deep meditations on the lives of women and how they're shaped and distorted by men who are careless, monstrous and all points in between...Supper Club fascinates as an unflinching embrace of women and their many appetites and smashes the patriarchy with heaping plates of pasta."-USA Today
"[A] deliciously anarchic first novel about an ever-growing group of women who gather to indulge in the hedonistic freedom of acting unladylike. Topless feasts and Prosecco-soaked dancing abound."-O, The Oprah Magazine
"A riotous still life-turned-food fight…Williams's writing is decadent and lush, and the narrative avoids any pat resolutions for women frustrated by the way our bodies have been commodified by chocolate pushers and fitness gurus alike."-Vulture
"Stephanie Danler's Sweetbitter meets Donna Tartt's The Secret History in this story of female desire, friendship, lust, and, above all, hunger....This novel will alternately make you laugh, tear up, and text your group chat begging to start a wayward dining committee."-Vogue
"[A] daring debut...Williams' descriptions of consumption are at turns mo...
Readers Top Reviews
Cynthia PerrineMarco
I cannot stress enough. Skip this book. It is so convoluted and bloated with its own cleverness that the handful of passages that weren't bad don't make up for the rest of it. I really wanted to like it. I hate that I finished it and wanted that time back. I rarely feel that way about books. There's nothing remotely redeeming about it so read Sweetbitter if you're looking for a coming of age book about food and sex.
reisy 5Twalker, Mari
Be forewarned that this book is not funny or light. It is an in depth descent in to one woman's depression and detachment from her life. She details her rape, self-harm, and failure to make meaningful connections with anyone in her peer group. I didn't find it to be insightful or a story about the strength of women. It was just sad and depressing.
Sine WaveAnonymous
For a story about taking up space and eating enthusiastically, this left me with a strangely empty feeling at the end. Although there were a few passages about friendships and relationships that seemed worth highlighting, I never felt eager to return to pick up the book after putting it aside. Possibly too many detailed descriptions of recipes for my personal comfort, especially during April 2020, while sorely missing both restaurant food and my sister’s home cooking. And the department store scene bothered me far more than it should have because NM is probably doomed to declare bankruptcy any day now. Plus there’s a particular area of the plot that I won’t mention, so no spoilers...but let’s just say it’s unpleasant for teachers to read about certain types of storylines. Could be mostly bad timing...but this was simply not my cup of tea.
Short Excerpt Teaser
The Fearful Are Caught
Lina was the first. We met her in a cafŽ with cloudy gray furnishings and a needless accumulation of potted plants. The tables were piled with magazines that had titles like Wheatsheaf and Gardenia, their covers featuring tanned girls with ribbony limbs, all pigtails and peasant dresses. One by one, Stevie turned them upside down. Lina messaged us from outside, and we watched her do it, crinkling her nose at the beginnings of rain.
I'm outside.
Shall I come inside?
I mean, shall I meet you inside?
Where are you sat?
Sorry, I just hate not knowing where to sit.
Are you near the back window? I think I can see you.
Okay, I can see you. I'm heading in now.
Sorry.
Sorry.
Lina had blond hair knotted over her shoulder. She wore a navy cord suit and a white silk shirt. Her bulky trainers were incongruous to her outfit. She explained she wears them to and from work but in the office is required to wear heels.
She worked as a front-office manager at an expensive hotel. It was reasonably paid; she'd get a discounted Caesar salad in the hotel bistro for lunch, plus use of the steam room and sauna. But she worked a fifty-hour week and once got docked pay for having chipped her nail varnish on the tram. And watching all the rooms being used for affairs and, worse, for ordering sex workers, had made her paranoid about her husband's fidelity.
"At first it was the middle-aged couples leering over the counter. Drunk and conspicuous, like we couldn't believe their audacity."
She wore a thin gold bracelet, which she rolled between her fingers. Spinning it in circles against her skin until it left a faint red mark.
"Then it was the younger ones. Women asking which lift would take them to Room Thirty-three. Their eyes never really leaving the floor. Walking out of the hotel still adjusting their clothes."
Stevie and I made notes: me scribbling into a notepad, Stevie tapping at her phone. We didn't know what we were collating at that point, but the data felt urgent and indispensable. Lina's round face turning pink.
"But it was the sex workers who got to me. And the men who use them. These completely ordinary-looking men."
Lina's obsession began with the women: eyeing the sizes of their waists, scrutinizing their faces-wondering whether her husband might find them attractive. She'd think about the way they dressed, whether her husband might want her to dress like that. The women mostly weren't sex workers, but to her they might as well all have been. These other women, with their lipstick and their lacquered hair. All offering something else, something new, something she never could-being in possession of just the one human body-and trying to make a penny off it, too. She wondered whether she hated these women or if she was afraid of them. Whether there was a difference.
She became fixated on the idea that her husband must be having an affair or using sex workers-or that he eventually would. She'd follow him home from work, leaving her own work early, making up doctors' appointments or dentist checkups, taking Ubers across town. She'd sit on the other side of the square outside the recruitment agency where he worked, having already taken note of the colors he was wearing that morning in order to better spot him. She'd follow him on the opposite side of the street, a few feet behind, her gaze fixed on him diagonally across the road. She'd trail him into shops on the way home from work, ducking behind the bread counter in Tesco. Once she held an especially large watermelon out in front of her head so she could walk past him undetected and check the contents of his basket (Jazz apples, cooked ham, Ritz crackers). She would trace him all the way to the train station, where he would sometimes stop for a drink at the station pub, not telling her, saying he had to work late; and if he was lying about this, then what else was he lying about? Dishonesty, she felt, was a spectrum; you might be on the less potent end, but you were still on it, prone to slip up, slide further along, depending on the circumstances.
She wouldn't stop until she had followed him all the way to their door, and then she would crouch down, sometimes crawl on her hands and knees, hiding behind the brick wall that fronted their home. She would wait there for thirty minutes, sometimes an hour, until she was sure, until she was absolutely certain, he wasn't going back out.
Once he had gone to bed, she would stay up late to devour his Internet activity: scrolling through his history after he'd fallen asleep. She installed a keystroke logger on their downstairs desktop, finding out all his passwords and accounts. When her husband used the bathroo...
Lina was the first. We met her in a cafŽ with cloudy gray furnishings and a needless accumulation of potted plants. The tables were piled with magazines that had titles like Wheatsheaf and Gardenia, their covers featuring tanned girls with ribbony limbs, all pigtails and peasant dresses. One by one, Stevie turned them upside down. Lina messaged us from outside, and we watched her do it, crinkling her nose at the beginnings of rain.
I'm outside.
Shall I come inside?
I mean, shall I meet you inside?
Where are you sat?
Sorry, I just hate not knowing where to sit.
Are you near the back window? I think I can see you.
Okay, I can see you. I'm heading in now.
Sorry.
Sorry.
Lina had blond hair knotted over her shoulder. She wore a navy cord suit and a white silk shirt. Her bulky trainers were incongruous to her outfit. She explained she wears them to and from work but in the office is required to wear heels.
She worked as a front-office manager at an expensive hotel. It was reasonably paid; she'd get a discounted Caesar salad in the hotel bistro for lunch, plus use of the steam room and sauna. But she worked a fifty-hour week and once got docked pay for having chipped her nail varnish on the tram. And watching all the rooms being used for affairs and, worse, for ordering sex workers, had made her paranoid about her husband's fidelity.
"At first it was the middle-aged couples leering over the counter. Drunk and conspicuous, like we couldn't believe their audacity."
She wore a thin gold bracelet, which she rolled between her fingers. Spinning it in circles against her skin until it left a faint red mark.
"Then it was the younger ones. Women asking which lift would take them to Room Thirty-three. Their eyes never really leaving the floor. Walking out of the hotel still adjusting their clothes."
Stevie and I made notes: me scribbling into a notepad, Stevie tapping at her phone. We didn't know what we were collating at that point, but the data felt urgent and indispensable. Lina's round face turning pink.
"But it was the sex workers who got to me. And the men who use them. These completely ordinary-looking men."
Lina's obsession began with the women: eyeing the sizes of their waists, scrutinizing their faces-wondering whether her husband might find them attractive. She'd think about the way they dressed, whether her husband might want her to dress like that. The women mostly weren't sex workers, but to her they might as well all have been. These other women, with their lipstick and their lacquered hair. All offering something else, something new, something she never could-being in possession of just the one human body-and trying to make a penny off it, too. She wondered whether she hated these women or if she was afraid of them. Whether there was a difference.
She became fixated on the idea that her husband must be having an affair or using sex workers-or that he eventually would. She'd follow him home from work, leaving her own work early, making up doctors' appointments or dentist checkups, taking Ubers across town. She'd sit on the other side of the square outside the recruitment agency where he worked, having already taken note of the colors he was wearing that morning in order to better spot him. She'd follow him on the opposite side of the street, a few feet behind, her gaze fixed on him diagonally across the road. She'd trail him into shops on the way home from work, ducking behind the bread counter in Tesco. Once she held an especially large watermelon out in front of her head so she could walk past him undetected and check the contents of his basket (Jazz apples, cooked ham, Ritz crackers). She would trace him all the way to the train station, where he would sometimes stop for a drink at the station pub, not telling her, saying he had to work late; and if he was lying about this, then what else was he lying about? Dishonesty, she felt, was a spectrum; you might be on the less potent end, but you were still on it, prone to slip up, slide further along, depending on the circumstances.
She wouldn't stop until she had followed him all the way to their door, and then she would crouch down, sometimes crawl on her hands and knees, hiding behind the brick wall that fronted their home. She would wait there for thirty minutes, sometimes an hour, until she was sure, until she was absolutely certain, he wasn't going back out.
Once he had gone to bed, she would stay up late to devour his Internet activity: scrolling through his history after he'd fallen asleep. She installed a keystroke logger on their downstairs desktop, finding out all his passwords and accounts. When her husband used the bathroo...
