My Ideal Dinner Party: A Novel

In the early days becoming a writer, to me, meant hosting or attending sophisticated dinner parties in a brownstone apartment with crown molding and paintings on the walls in some city like New York or Paris. This might explain why I’m a much better dinner party hostess than I am a writer. My capacity for rigid discipline only extends to planning dinner party menus and playing the woman of society.

I’m a damn good dinner party hostess (there’s a reason why I’m obsessed with Julia and Nigella and Ina). The first party I hosted was actually a Halloween celebration that took the form of a book-themed (let’s be honest, it was mostly Harry Potter-themed) potluck. All my guests were instructed to bring a dish based on a book. While the point of a potluck is to not have to make a bunch of dishes yourself, I made a lot of food anyway—my creative ambition just took over.

At the time of the party, I occupied a two-bedroom apartment in Atlanta, the largest space I’ve ever inhabited on my own. I had enough kitchen and living room space to easily set up a buffet and seat 10 people. There wasn’t one large table for us all to sit around, but there was a sofa and coffee table, lots of extra chairs, and plenty of room to mingle.

Mingling always seemed key to my writerly dinner party fantasy. I always pictured having guests standing with small plates and wine glasses in hand, having conversations with the people at the party they found themselves drawn to.

At my Halloween part I really wanted people to mingle. I wanted my guests to like each other as much as I liked all of them as individuals. I remember that the conversation was first, awkwardly, focused on the food (butterbeer, For Whom the Hummus Tolls, a sorting hat pita bread, mud burgers from a Roald Dahl story, chocolate frogs, Weasley’s Fever Fudge). Then the topic shifted to the decorations (the potion-mixing station for drinks, a message in red letters scrawled across the bathroom mirror about the Chamber of Secrets being opened, and a sign on the toilet that read ‘Myrtle waz here’). Finally, everyone started to really get to know each other, to break off and have smaller, more intimate conversations.

As the hostess, I couldn’t have been more pleased than if I had suddenly become the omniscient narrator of my dinner party, already knowing and telling the story of how everything would unfold.

Wait...maybe planning a dinner party is a lot like writing.

Think about it: The driving force behind most written works is the characters. And a dinner party will amount to nothing if the guest list is shit.

From inviting the perfect characters to getting the setting just right, here’s my plan for the ideal dinner party (as though it were a novel).

• Characters. Although I’m technically the narrator of the book that is my dinner party, it’s the characters I’ve invited who will keep the ‘story’ moving. They bring the color, the personality to the party. Without them, there’s no plot. When choosing dinner party characters, it’s important to keep in mind who will be most likely to provide great dialogue. The number of characters I choose to include will ultimately be based on the setting of my dinner party (more on Setting later), but I also know that only a handful of guests will likely stay at the party from beginning to end. Taking note of who will be mostly likely to stay for the entire party and who will be most likely to exit early will help me figure out what storylines I need to follow.

[The following are imaginary versions of real people]

1. Stephen Fry (Protagonist, spends the evening trying to get people to talk about the state of the world and where we all went wrong)
2. Dorothy Parker (Will add a brief rush of Algonquin Round Table frivolity before she’s off to another party—I give her two, maybe three martinis)
3. Stacey Abrams (I really admire Stacey Abrams! Since it’s a busy time for signing up new voters, she’ll likely only stay for the charcuterie board. That’s OK, I’ll send her home with a tupperware filled with some of my lamb roast stuffed with anchovies)
4. My 3 favorite Great British Bake-Off contestants: Ruby Tandoh, Tamal Ray, Nadiya Hussain (For fun, I might assign them all a technical challenge to try to perform in my tiny Brooklyn Kitchenette)
5. Nigella Lawson (It might be dumb to invite a world-renowned food personality to my party. Don’t care, I’m baking her clementine cake, and I’d love to get her critique)
6. Jane Austen (Her presence will be felt. Everyone at the party will find that they’ve been turned into an unflattering character in a new novel she’s found time to work on in death)

• Setting. Brooklyn. Autumn. A one-bedroom apartment with a non-working fireplace, crown molding, and paintings on the walls. The space is a bit cramped for 10 people, and the table space and seating are a bit unconventional (a steamer trunk, a sofa, a bench, and folding chairs placed randomly around the living space). There’s something very bohemian about the feel of this apartment. Perhaps it’s the organized clutter or all the kitsch I can’t help buying.
• Plot. Random writers, dead people, food celebrities, and political activists gather for a dinner party to celebrate the start of Autumn. One of the dinner party guests, Stephen Fry, is trying to start a discussion about what the world has come to.
• Conclusion. I mean, the thing is, this dinner party really won’t end like a novel. There’s no narrative structure to life. That’s something I can maybe apply later when I write about this night in my journal

Oh, I forgot one key thing! The menu:

• Roasted red pepper hummus & a charcuterie board served with roasted orange negronis (there’s a roasted theme at the cocktail hour)
• Lamb roast stuffed with Anchovies and swerved with couscous, plus loads of red wine
• For dessert, Nigella’s clementine cake (made by moi!)