Supper Club by Lara Williams
“What could violate social convention more than women coming together to indulge their hunger and take up space?”
In Lara Williams’ debut novel, Supper Club (2019), eating is an act of social rebellion. Set in England, the novel follows Roberta, a woman in her late twenties who, alongside her best friend Stevie, creates the titular Supper Club: a group in which women come together to indulge their hunger, satisfy their desires, and take up space. The group is created as a resistance against the societal expectation for women to restrict themselves in all areas of life. On creating the club, Roberta reflects: “My whole life was the push/pull of appetite: wanting to consume but also to be consumed.” Having a complicated relationship history with food, Roberta experiments with giving in to her desires, instead of trying to control them.
The women rent restaurant spaces to host their evenings of hedonism, bin-diving for the ingredients to cook their feasts. They gorge themselves, abandoning cutlery in favour of wielding steaks with their hands. They dance wildly, they take drugs, they bare their breasts, they vomit in dark corners. The club has one simple rule: “eat whatever’s in front of you and be sure to eat it all.”
“We wanted to expand and to be nourished—we wanted to know how that felt. To be full up, instead of hungry and wanting, all the time.”
An important element of Supper Club is intentional weight gain. It is Stevie’s idea that the women will become “living art projects”, wearing the evidence of their subversion and learning how it feels to physically take up more space. This generates some conflict in Roberta’s life, both internally and externally, and the novel spends time reflecting on society’s mistreatment of plus-size women.
The novel follows a dual timeline: the past, in which Roberta is at university; and the present, when she is forming Supper Club. As these two timelines unfold, alternating each chapter, we are able to see how the formative experiences of young Roberta have impacted her present-day life.
It is while she is at university that Roberta learns to cook. Friendless, socially insecure, and disappointed by the reality of university life, Roberta turns to food. She spends hours upon hours in her university flatshare kitchen, teaching herself elaborate recipes. Roberta sees this as a way of dealing with her “bottomless, yearning hunger”: “Cooking became the buffer: an act of civility before the carnage ensued.” Williams’ prose is incisive, nailing the feelings of isolation that can come with moving away for university, and the coping mechanisms that we develop to deal with loneliness.
While occasionally Roberta shares her creations with her flatmates, she usually cooks for herself alone. During this time, Roberta views cooking as “sort of a radical act … It’s the transience. All that time for a fleeting pleasure. Nothing else is like that.” By making cooking radical, young Roberta inverts the traditional understanding of cooking as domestic and mundane, foreshadowing her future endeavours with Supper Club.
“A clan of my own that I could feed and nurture. An image of us, wild and hungry—and still expanding.”
Roberta meets Stevie while working a menial closet-organising job at a fashion website. Stevie is loud, confident, and opinionated – Roberta’s opposite in every way. In this friendship, Roberta finds the intimacy she has always craved; “I felt like I’d been enrolled into a club I’d never known anything about—and it was wonderful.” They soon move in together, and their life is more that of a married couple than of roommates: they spend every second with each other, often sharing a bed, and eat meals that Roberta spends hours cooking every night. However, as tensions rise between the co-founders of Supper Club, this matrimonial bliss may not be destined to last.
As the novel progresses, so too do the Supper Club events – as their actions become more dangerous, and more illegal, Roberta must learn to balance this with her new relationship, and discern how far she is willing to go to subvert social expectations and fulfil her desires.
Despite the wild nature of the club, Williams’ novel is about much more than indulgence and hedonism. At its heart, it is about the modern-day experience of womanhood – a coming-of-age story about a woman in her late twenties. It is about the incredibly intense closeness of female friendship, and how this closeness can sometimes turn sour. It is about our desires, both loud and quiet, and the difficult choices these often lead us to.
Macey Smart is a writer and editor from lutruwita/Tasmania. She recently graduated from the University of Tasmania with First Class Honours in English, with a research project on women and food in contemporary literature. You can find her work in Togatus, where she was the Deputy Editor for 2023, as well as swim meet lit mag and Playdough Magazine.