Lara Williams "Supper Club"
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 both in 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.
Paperback, 247 pages