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Wednesday, November 6, 2019

Supper Club by Lara Williams

It is hard to put my finger on exactly what this book is and what it is not.  The generation described here is millennial, and the voice feels akin to another author of this age, Sally Rooney: colloquial, precise, at once uneasy about its place in the world and determined to stand up for itself.
This is women cooking, in all that the idea of it contains.  Spiritual, craft, home, it is all wrapped up here.  The supper club of the title could be read as a feminist take on the anarchic men’s group in Fight Club. What girls do with toxic estrogen rather than what boys do with toxic testosterone.  But not quite, that isn't exactly right.
It begins when, after university, Roberta gets an entry-level job folding clothes at a fashion website and makes friends with a new colleague, Stevie. “We discussed our menstrual cycles and our favourite films and our most hated male writers.” This is the intimacy she’s always craved. The two young women move in together and Roberta has an appreciative audience for her cooking at last, creating elaborate feasts every night. Then together they dream up the idea of making this more communal and more subversive, spiraling to a point of lost control.  I lost sight of the good and so did Roberta's boyfriend.  When to put the brakes on is a question that is contemplated here.

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