Entertaining Disasters: A Novel (With Recipes)

Entertaining Disasters: A Novel (With Recipes)

by Nancy Spiller
Entertaining Disasters: A Novel (With Recipes)

Entertaining Disasters: A Novel (With Recipes)

by Nancy Spiller

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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: 9781582439884
Publisher: Catapult
Publication date: 05/01/2009
Sold by: Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format: eBook
Pages: 336
File size: 690 KB

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.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

GRAINS OF PARADISE

I paw through the kitchen cupboard for my Grains of Paradise, the seeds of a flowering West African plant used in medieval Europe as an inexpensive alternative to the precious black pepper of South India's Malabar region. Grains of Paradise look like peppercorns, only they're smaller and, when bitten into, have a floral essence with a hot aftertaste. Few people in modern times have ever heard of them; thus the necessity of finding the small plastic pouch, ordered online and delivered by U.S. mail, for my dinner party Saturday night. I'll sprinkle the cracked seeds on the squab before grilling. The novelty will provide a few moments of energetic conversation as guests exclaim and inquire as to its history and use.

If I can find it. If I can't, I'll have to find something else to talk about.

Like the fact that I haven't given an actual dinner party in nearly ten years. This despite my having written about them for countless magazines and newspapers during that same period, as if I had been graciously throwing them on a regular basis as effortlessly as others breathe.

The truth is, I am a food writer giving my first dinner party in a decade after inventing them for the page all that time. In print you'd think I slept in a hostess apron and oven mitts alongside a rumaki tray. In truth, just the thought of having people over left me paralyzed with fear. Despite doing it most all my life before I started writing about it, I considered each and every event an unmitigated disaster voided only by launching plans for the next dinner party or Sunday brunch or ladies' luncheon. I believed with the hope of the blind, naîve, and foolish that every new undertaking would be better than the last.

I don't want to talk about that during the course of the evening's festivities; hence I must find the Grains of Paradise, a more suitable, less volatile subject. Especially since the reason for the evening is Richard Cronenberg, an editor for a major food magazine who believes in my fantasy-hostess life and who I hope will ask me to write about more such mythical events for his publication.

The grains are here somewhere, buried deep, past the truffle oil I consider too expensive to use anytime I remember its existence, and the can of baking powder untouched since my last biscuit foray, about a decade ago, when carbohydrates were still cool, past the hundred and one different kinds of tea we keep even though my husband and I only drink it when we're out of coffee, a condition we're so paranoid about facing it will never happen, not in this house, not in our lifetime — still, I can't resist a good-looking box of tea, getting all the alleged soothing and inspirational benefits of the beverage just from the packaging art — past the balsamic vinegar, the real thing, the good stuff from Modena, a bottle hand-carried back from Italy, boasting the official D.O.P. stamp assuring its twenty-five years of age and meeting traditional standards currently maintained by the Consorzio Produttori. This isn't the same stuff that they pour onto the plate along with olive oil for dipping bread, or use by the bucket for salad dressing at every Italian restaurant. This is the sumptuous distillation of the unfermented musts of trebbiano, lambrusco, and sauvignon grapes boiled in an open copper pot over a direct flame down to a syrupy thickness, then aged in a succession of various wood barrels, including chestnut, cherry, oak, juniper, mulberry, each imparting its own perfume and hint of flavor — a method dating back to the early Middle Ages and perfected during the Renaissance by the Ducal family of Este, who kept a special room in their palace in Modena for the aging that would span generations, the precious end product being of prime interest in many Modenese wills. When Modena was threatened with bombing by Allied planes in World War II, evacuees were seen taking the family cask of vinegar along as one of their most precious possessions. This balsamic vinegar is so potent it is used in droplets, for centuries was considered medicinal, enjoyed by the sip like a cordial. Rossini is said to have cured scurvy with it (and what, might one ask, was Rossini doing with scurvy?). It is a phenomenon from a slower, more intensely flavored and authentic world that is difficult to secure and comes, always, at a steep price. Troppo caro, as the Italians say. Too dear.

I'll leave the good bottle out on the counter, even though I'll use only a few drops in the vinaigrette, mixing it in with a large measure of the less expensive supermarket ringer, the industrial version of balsamic, that has caramel additives to fake the real thing's aged mellow sweetness. The authentic item in the eccentric bottle is part of the set dressing for the party, six days from today, my panic regarding the evening's conversation content having set in particularly early, and I can't settle down to the other, more substantive tasks until I've found a potential icebreaker.

"Why do they call it balsamic?" an unsuspecting guest will ask. It's all the flick of a riding crop I need. "For its alleged health-giving properties," I'll respond, galloping off from there down my usual garrulous path. I'll try to rein myself in, but sometimes it's hard; sometimes I suspect I know far too much about food, and nothing about so many much more important things. Not that food isn't the stuff of life. It's just that at times I wonder if there isn't more to life than this stuff. Anyway, it's what I do, and my incessant talking and thinking and writing about it is a professional hazard, so, my apologies in advance to all my evening's victims.

I grab the step stool, which hoists me up another foot and a half, and there they are, the Grains of Paradise, lurking behind a stack of toothpick boxes. Hostess Tip #3, 112: One can never have too many toothpicks, but do try to use them sometime. I set a box on the counter and resolve to find something to stab I set a box on the counter and resolve to find something to stab them into during the evening's merriment. I set the Ziploc bag of Grains of Paradise next to the balsamic vinegar — a dress rehearsal for Saturday's program.

Okay, that's good for one chatty stretch. What else will we talk about?

At my invented dinner parties, conversation flows like vintage Dom Pérignon. Every one of my highly cultivated, well-traveled, and gastronomically sophisticated guests is at ease, witty, and bright, while I enlighten and entertain a deliciously captive audience with well-crafted bits of culinary esoterica. In truth, I've always had to dig desperately and deep to whip a brief moment of banter into bubbly blocks of time and pray that my tongue won't be tied and my brain frozen by the end of the first hour, knowing there will be, if I am both blessed and cursed by the presence of actual guests, several more hours to fill.

I realize full well that I play a large part in my misery. I am a writer working at home. I have nothing to say, but a greater need than most to say it. I am also married and, contrary to popular myth, this arrangement of a second, known entity cohabiting under the same roof does not provide some measure of company. An Episcopal priest once referred to marriage, of which he had performed many, as "the end of loneliness." I trust he was being ironic. Marriage isn't the end of loneliness; if anything, it's a final confirmation of just how lonely two people can be. I married that outgoing Other with the dashing smile and ebullient manner only to discover that, like the tool box he owned but didn't know how to use, he was as uncomfortable in the larger world as I.

Now long conjoined, our daily tête-à-têtes involve tracking dull household details and mapping nonevents. "Ja eat?" is couples' French for "I'm hungry, and all else at this moment will remain unspoken." Guests, on the other hand, force you to say something fresh and engaging in the quotidian setting of your own home. They are like good art in the sense that they re-present the world. Toss a few around the living room, and suddenly you will see yourself in a new light — even if it is the ashy glare of burning adrenalin.

When desperately seeking topics of discussion, know that under no circumstances is television considered suitable, lest one be labeled a Television Watcher. This is a challenge for me, considering that as a child I was raised by the Idiot Box or Boob Tube, as my father dubbed it — growing up in the suburbs of Northern California. I still have a fondness for it today, on a strict anthropological basis, of course. During my previous Dinner Party Throwing Era (DPTE), my rule was no television for two weeks leading up to the date. Like a snail dining on lettuce prior to becoming someone's feast, I would cleanse myself of all tainted televised stimuli so that more subtle and civilized discussions could evolve, prompted by a recent New Yorker article or a fascinating book finally finished.

This was because no one watched television anymore, or at least admitted watching it. And if they did confess to a few brief moments of attention blown on the déclassé box, it was only because they were busting a gut to tell you about some special they'd caught on a premium cable channel (during a week when it was free, as they would never dream of paying for it) or the decline of civilization they'd witnessed on one of the increasingly desperate broadcast networks' shows.

And whatever it was they'd watched, I no doubt hadn't seen it. There were no "must see" shows, because no one watched television anymore, so there was no way to anticipate potential common ground, know what you should try to watch in an effort to participate in an exchange. I was left no choice but to listen and nod at their monologue, just as they might have to suffer in silence if I seized the pulpit with a food foray.

TV is considered a waste of time, a distraction from work or exercise, which are good for you, but a solo pursuit, not a shared culture. Movies used to be a shared culture, but good ones and the time to see them and the likelihood that whoever you were talking to had seen the same film were becoming as rare a treat as a four-leaf clover found on the 405 freeway during rush hour. Shared popular culture of an intelligent nature is increasingly difficult to come by. We are all islands, or maybe glacier pups, bumping into each other in arctic waters in the middle of the night.

But I didn't have two weeks this time around for my TV fast. By Thursday last, ten days before the big day, my mind was too wobbly for words on the page. I needed a comalike calm achieved only by watching something that moved across a screen and spoke to me, however low the level of discourse, and despite the fact that it was a piece of furniture.

It didn't matter what I watched, since gabbing about it wasn't going to be an option. Thursday night's TV listing featured a promising distraction: an episode of a three-part BBC documentary on PBS about a house built in London to re-create life for the British middle class in the year 1900. Its talking stock potential rose because it was on PBS, with bonus points earned for originating with the BBC. Maybe I'd cull an entertaining three-sentence critique from an hour or two spent.

I sat, I watched, I saw a British family from the end of the twentieth century living in the 1900 house for a period of months while camera crews captured the time travelers' challenges. The entire episode was filled with the wife's complaints about dust. Her days were devoted to chasing dust balls across floors, lodged beneath furniture, and settled on every surface. It was driving her mad, she said, absolutely bonkers, and her solution was to hire a lower-class female to dust. This woman was as desperately dull as I feared I was becoming. Mention this to anyone, and they'd start acting like dust bunnies, drifting toward the door.

I grabbed my volume of A Brief History of Time, which I'd begun to read dozens of times before, pulled on my sweats, and headed for the gym. Walking helped me focus when I was too frazzled to sit and read. I mounted the treadmill, marched an hour with Stephen Hawking, exercised my brain and body, burned a few calories, and finally got past page twenty-two, a few stomps closer to understanding the theory of relativity, yet miles away from anything interesting to say while staring deep into the gaze of a living guest.

The reason I go to such great lengths to salt the kitchen with conversation pieces, like the bottle of twenty-five-year-old aceto balsamico and the Grains of Paradise, and read books that I won't finish, barely understand, and won't retain a week after I shut the cover, is that I have no family to speak of. I am reminded of this when I pull the balsamic bottle from the cupboard only to reveal a box of fruit jellies. These dusty-looking squares of brightly colored jelly, each artificially flavored to match a cartoon concept of fruit, i.e., red for strawberry, green for apple, and so on, are too suspect to eat and too emotionally charged to throw away. They were a gift from my brother Hailey countless Christmases ago.

They are a physical manifestation of my ghost family, the family that exists beyond my reach. They haunt me with their distance, and because of this distance I can't go a day without thinking of them. They are ever present in my thoughts, yet I don't speak of them to anyone, as if their distance, which I've never understood, were my personal failing. They are my dark obsession, thoughts of them gnawing at me constantly, like a pack of mice tunneling into a loaf of bread.

Talk of television with my guests would reveal the bare horizon of my days. A glimpse of my ghost family would hint at the blank landscape of my life.

Hailey's jelly squares came with no return address. Most years it's just a card. Because there is never a return address, I am unable to reciprocate. My father gives me phone numbers to call, and I get disconnected lines. The addresses he finds when asked come back RETURN TO SENDER. Because of this, I can't stop thinking about Hailey. I wonder what could I do or say that would make him want me in his life? Or get him to leave me permanently alone? I rehearse the speeches in my head. I know this is ridiculous, yet I am unable to abandon the idea that he is my family and family is all I've got. I feel helpless to keep this chronic Hailey invasion from my mind.

There are no calls or cards coming from my younger brother, Howard. I know well where he can be found, but consider him an untouchable. His anger has metastasized to such an alarming degree, I've stopped visiting for fear of my safety. He lives in an old farmhouse on a few acres east of Livermore, in Northern California, where he stores earthmoving equipment and keeps a pack of vicious rescued dogs, dogs that bark and threaten in a way he can only dream of doing himself. Last time I paid a call, I left shaking and never went back. It has been surprisingly easy not to act on the urge to contact him when I'm in the area, but painful all the same. He makes no effort at communication, and that makes me worry about him, still. Why? Because the thought of him breaks my heart. Proof, I suppose, that I still have one.

I don't know if my sister, Hunter, is alive or dead. The last I heard from her was a message left on my cell phone, which I rarely use or retrieve messages from, so it's a safe number to call if someone doesn't want to talk to me. She said she had uterine cancer and just wanted me to know "so you can keep an eye on yourself." My father assured me she was fine, though he said he couldn't find her phone number when I asked, or that he'd temporarily misplaced her new address and he'd get back to me with it, but he never did. He would never say she asked him not to give me the information; he preferred to distract, as is his nature, with amusing feints and quips and was expert at changing the subject.

If Hunter were dead he probably wouldn't tell me that, either. He doesn't like to upset.

My father takes my phone calls, returns them when required. He accepts my visits but makes none of his own. We talk of the weather and real estate prices and the mysteries surrounding my ancestors several generations back. We don't talk of the living or of our family's dissolution or of my mother, who is living, but not in our world and hasn't been fully since before I was born.

All of this gets a fresh stir when grieving families who have lost loved ones are reported on the news. My family remains in corporeal existence in the form of six people, yet died in spirit sometime long ago in a tragedy no one has ever discussed. They are like an exploding cloud of space dust, particulate matter racing farther apart with time's passage. If a microphone were shoved into their faces in search of a reaction to our clan's demise, the response would be a blank stare or no comment.

(Continues…)


Excerpted from "Entertaining Disasters"
by .
Copyright © 2009 Nancy Spiller.
Excerpted by permission of Counterpoint.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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