Verwandte Artikel zu Supper Club

Supper Club - Hardcover

Williams, Lara

 
9780525539582: Supper Club
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0525539581 ISBN 13: 9780525539582
Verlag: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2019

Inhaltsangabe

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.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Lara Williams is the author of the short story collection A Selfie as Big as the Ritz, and her writing has been featured in The Guardian, The Independent, Vice, the Times Literary Supplement, McSweeney's, and elsewhere. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and is featured in Best British Short Stories 2017. She writes and teaches creative writing at Manchester Metropolitan University. She lives in Manchester, England.

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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 bathroom or showered in the morning, or popped out to buy a pint of milk, she would check his phone, reading his texts, looking at his photos, reviewing his outgoing calls. She learned what kind of pornography he liked and that sometimes he looked up his old girlfriends on Facebook. But no sex workers. Never sex workers. She began feeling almost resentful at his inactivity, thinking about all the well-dressed businessmen who ordered champagne and chateaubriand sent to their rooms, who wouldn't patch through their wives' telephone calls-did he really think he was better than them?

It became a routine of sorts. The following. The checking up. The phone. One Saturday afternoon he went to watch the football, and she noticed his phone left behind on the kitchen counter. She didn't even think about it, it was instinctive. Perched against the oven, she opened his messages: a text from an unknown number. Thanks for last night, let's do it again soon, how much do I owe you for the room-punctuated by an image of lips, clavicle, rib cage, and breasts. She stared at the message for a while, worrying she had imagined it, that she had literally willed it into existence. She waited for the anger, the disappointment, the betrayal she had anticipated to course through her veins, surprised when all she felt-all she actually felt-was relief. It was over. It had happened. And it didn't hurt that bad.

"That's why I'm here," she told us. "That's why I want to do this."

Stevie and I could not contain ourselves. We squeezed hands underneath the table. She grinned back at us.

"You're in," Stevie said.

"We've not got a date for the first one yet," I added. "Or a venue. But we're looking. Probably something next month."

We finished our drinks and told her more about our vision for Supper Club. We told her about the ethos. About what we hoped the events would look like. The sort of women we were hoping to recruit.

"So your husband," Stevie said. "Did you leave him after you found out?"

"Oh, no," she replied, perhaps a little dreamily. "We stayed together. We're kind of happier than we've ever been. It's weird to think," she added. "It was just one year. Just one really peculiar year. But it transformed my life forever."

Stevie's face changed. "That's ridiculous," she said, forever teetering on the precipice of hostility, never afraid to speak her mind.

"Don't you think that's ridiculous, Roberta?" She turned to me. "To put an emphasis on one arbitrary stretch of time that's . . . you know, a total construct? I mean, we are all just these giant accumulations of stuff and experiences and talking and things happening to us. You can't break a human life down into years and say that one of them in particular really means something."

Lina looked embarrassed. She began fiddling with her bracelet again.

"Roberta?" Stevie said. "Roberta, don't you agree?"

I half smiled-out of generosity or discomfort, it was often hard to know. And I didn't say that I didn't agree, but I didn't say that I did.

Expectations

The September that I left for...

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Verlag
G.P. Putnam's Sons
Erscheinungsdatum
2019
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0525539581
ISBN 13 
9780525539582
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Auflage
1
Anzahl der Seiten
304
Kontakt zum Hersteller
G.P. Putnam's Sons
https://www.penguin.com/putnam/

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