Entertaining Disasters: A Novel (With Recipes)

by Nancy Spiller

Overview

"This zany novel will make you appreciate your own fallen soufflés that much more." --Redbook

The writer known only as FW lives high on the food chain in the heady realm of L.A.s culinary journalism scene. She waxes poetic about her hip home gatherings, thinly veiling the identities of her Hollywood guest list. At least, it seems that way to her readers. In reality, FW's been inventing the dinner parties she writes about because social paralysis sets in at the very thought of a real guest in her fabulous--or is it shabby?--hillside home.

Enter the glossy food magazine editor, new in town, who wants an invitation to one of her bashes, and the panic-stricken journey from fantasy to reality is on . . .

Entertaining Disasters--at turns whimsical and deeply affecting--chronicles the struggle FW faces in the week before she hosts her first real dinner party in ages. At the same time, her estranged sister threatens to drop by, her husband takes off, and even more disaster looms, in this "funny, satirical novel" (Booklist) that "offers sharp, startling observations in a unique and very human voice" (Elle).

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781582434513
Publisher:	Catapult
Publication date:	01/06/2009
Pages:	328
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Nancy Spiller is a writer and artist currently living in Los Angeles. A third generation California native, she was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area and is a graduate of San Francisco State University. She served as staff feature writer at the San Jose Mercury News and its Sunday magazine, West , and at the Los Angeles Herald Examiner. She was editor and internationally syndicated columnist for the Los Angeles Times Syndicate's Entertainment News Service. Her essays and articles have appeared in numerous magazines and newspapers including the Los Angeles Times Sunday Magazine, McCall's, Mother Jones, Salon.com, and Coagula Art Journal. Her fiction has appeared in the Rain City Review.

She has studied art at the Pasadena Art Center College of Design and UCLA. Her recent installation and exhibition at L.A. Contemporary Gallery in Culver City, "Reverse Trash Streams: The Junk Mail Project," featured 157 pounds of shredded junk mail, the result of one year's worth collected at her home, accompanied by her Shredded series of paintings and drawings. Art in America lauded it for its humor, resigned pathos and concern with "larger social issues."

She lives with her husband Tom, their dog and two cats at the edge of a preserved coastal canyon on Los Angeles' wild western edge.

Editorial Reviews

"[Entertaining Disasters] is an extended brood on food, love, family, and the exhausting rat race of L.A. . . . it offers sharp, startling observations in a unique and very human voice." --Elle

"This zany novel (with recipes) will make you appreciate your own fallen souffles that much more." --Redbook

"With deftness and wit, Nancy Spiller delivers needle-sharp insights into middle-class life and marriage, while portraying the dissolution of a family and the rise of longing for a culinary salvation." --Janet Fitch, author of White Oleander and Paint It Black

"Cooking, we begin to see, allows FW to do what her family could not--meld warring ingredients into a harmonious whole. The looming dinner party is her bid for psychic as well as social redemption . . . Entertaining Disasters offers memoir's most potent pairing: the child's eye, sensual and vindictive, with the grown-up's aching heart . . . it's a testament to Spiller's skill as a narrator that tragedy and comedy begin to seem like a natural couple and that feeding a gathering of friends is the ultimate modern ordeal." --Ariel Swartley, Los Angeles Magazine

From the Publisher

The unnamed heroine of Spiller's debut is an L.A. epicurean who's made a career writing about her perfect dinner parties. The only problem? She hasn't thrown one in years-in fact, she dislikes socializing at all. But when a well-placed magazine editor asks for an invite, our heroine is forced to reproduce her fantasy life for a do-or-die dinner. What looks at first like a three-act rom-com spends hundreds of pages spinning its wheels, the paralyzed narrator pinging between food trivia and recollections of a neglectful, withholding mother. As promised, the novel contains recipes, but most are unexecutable and only some relevant. Aside from epicurean concerns, the heroine's focus sticks mainly to the flaws in her surroundings; there's no learning or growing, just a litany of worries over the coming party, lots of blame-throwing and unhappiness. Despite Spiller's clever way with words, her reach falls short of social satire, resulting in a static character study of a whining foodie. (Jan.)

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Publishers Weekly

A food writer prepares to host a dinner party. Step one: Grouse. Step two: Clear the skeletons out of the closet. The unnamed heroine of Spiller's debut novel is a journalist who made her reputation by living a lie-she's often written about the do's and don'ts of hosting the perfect dinner party but is terrified of hosting one herself. So when she's forced to entertain at her Los Angeles home to impress hotshot food-magazine editor Richard Cronenberg, she shifts into panic mode. In the early pages of the book, that means a lot of snarky commentary about the shallowness of Los Angeles, her estranged family and her nearly loveless marriage (she calls her husband "Somebody"), plus chapters that end with recipes whose directions add a dash of irony. What's initially set up as farce-Murphy's Law having its way with life-soon takes a severe tonal shift. The book integrates flashbacks to the heroine's mother, Lenore, whose sad, isolated life as a single mom led to institutionalization, electroshock treatments and the contempt of her extended family. This back story helps explain why the narrator is so high-strung about the dinner party: "I know what happens to women who can't do their job," she says. But Spiller never convincingly connects the Type A writer and the dour girl whose schizophrenic mom buried a botched Thanksgiving turkey in the backyard, though the writer tries a few metaphorical feints to sell the idea. (Both suffer wounds in a bathtub, for instance.) Naturally, the dinner plans go off the rails-Cronenberg cancels, Somebody goes on a business trip-but the story remains strangely bifurcated and static, with the narrator's present self smugly expounding about organicmarkets while her teenage self wrings her hands over her broken home. Her sister Hunter is something of a mediating influence, both in the narrator's life and in the novel's structure, but her role is heavily telegraphed-she's arriving with a mysterious present that's regularly referred to but not unpacked until the final pages. Earnest but undercooked.

Kirkus Reviews