What Happens When Women Start Taking up Space | Supper Club by Lara Williams

Appetites and vulnerabilities of the body: a female perspective

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“There are lots of different theories on how best to caramelize onions. There is the Momofuku method, in which you use a twelve-inch cast-iron skillet and cook the onions on a very high heat. You have to warm the oil first, until it’s bubbling but not smoking, then toss in the onions, six onions specifically, which, when chopped, should fill around eight standard American measuring cups.”

The meticulous and methodical experience of following a recipe can be one of the most satisfying things to do like accomplish a strenuous exercise and, at one time, a relieved act to impose a kind of dignity on hunger, an act of civility before the carnage ensued.

Lara Williams’s debut ‘Supper Club’ is a perfect combination of how this dichotomy hunger-anger can be embedded and release in a vindication act of freedom.

Roberta uses cooking at university, in a northern English city, as an escutcheon to avoid succumbing in a dashing whirlwind of loneliness, depression and defeatism in a shared flat where she’s couldn’t really make friends, missing her comfort-zone. She though leaving home would be a liberation, university would be a dance party, where you can spend your evenings drinking cheap red wine and talking about the Middle East. She just thought it would be different, she would be different. When, after university, she starts an entry level job as “writer” (euphemism intended) that later on turn into folding clothes for a fashion website, she just genuinely realizes how in lieu of a life, she settled on an existence. At least, there, she met a new colleague, Stevie, and unexpectedly they become friends, creating an intimate relationship.

“We discussed our menstrual cycles and our favourite films and our most hated male writers.”

The two young girls move together and finally Roberta has an audience for her cooking session, creating elaborated dishes, exploring a new spectrum of cooking as self-nurturing and self-satisfying act.

Together, Roberta and Stevie, decide to lead this commutual ritual into something bigger, something more subversive, transgressive. That is the Supper Club, co-hosted secret dinner parties involving a small group of women. They hire (well, legally or close to) restaurants, settle a theme, dumpster-dive for food and dress up to the nines.

‘Well, what could violate social convention more than women coming together to indulge their hunger and take up space?

During this unconventional sort of bacchanalian rite, they gorge an unusual amount of food, eat chunks of meat with their hands, they talk, dance, perform, shout, they throw the food at walls, they take drugs, alcohol, they have sex, vomit, and commit petty crimes.

At the end of each session, we would lie flat on the floor, our eyes closed, gently breathing. This, Jessa told us, was corpse position, and it was my favourite.

“I could lie in corpse position forever!” I once told her.

“And one day you will,” she replied.

This secret club is a pure and atavistic way of reclaiming female freedom through the concept of the body, which means finding a physical space to occupy and – simultaneously - exploring the voracious desire to occupy more and more of it. Becoming bigger, expand their bodies to taking up space, fill themselves, to free themselves.

In fact, if on one hand this novel talks about taking up physical space, on the other hand it also explores the complex psychology behind finding a metaphorical space in the world, which is one of the biggest concern and challenge of every 30 years-or so-old. This inherently process to acquire a self-conscious idea of yourself, who you are, who or what you want to be, and what is your space in the world. Roberta, as well as Stevie, are lost in this world, they feel anxious, overwhelmed, and inadequate.

“I was still so afraid and yet so desirous of everything. Fear and freedom, occupying opposite ends of the spectrum, though inexorably tied”

Nonetheless, there is a multiplicity of themes eviscerated through the narration that ricochets from past to present, whereas the central themes still gravitate around identity, sexuality, friendship, and females’ relationship with the body.

Lara Williams ably raises the sensitive issue of women’s’ oppression, not only by men that use the female body as a tool to give vent to their instincts, but more in general by the society. In this context, a wide range of contemporary matter related to rape, sexual harassments, and #MeToo experiences are tackled along with sexual identity and body perception. From a female perspective, the Supper Club is the definitive resolution to breaking certain behavioural codes. Girls – first – and women – later- receive a sort of pre-packaged language when it comes to behave and talk about eating and sexual appetites, telling them that those appetites are abject and amoral. It's appropriate - even predictable - that women talk about weight loss, restriction, portion control, diets, and calories. The diet culture has widely been normalized over the years to the extend that it’s considered ‘normal’ that all women have the intrinsic aspiration of thinness as the pinnacle of success and beauty. Diet culture as the lens through which the society view beauty, food, bodies, and health; a lens that twist your perception, the way in which you treat yourself and eventually demonize certain types of food. This is what the Supper Club propose as manifesto; overturn this preconcept, be subversive and celebrate womanhood in all its nuances.

‘It’s about existing in spaces we’re told we shouldn’t exist in, or how we behave in certain spaces that expect us to behave a certain way, to be a certain thing – and what if we don’t want to be that thing? What if we don’t want to behave in that way?’

Astonishingly incisive and intensely vivid, Supper Club is an authentic cross-section of an entire generation in the modern era.