“No one likes a mad woman,” Taylor Swift croons in a song she released during the pandemic. Though I didn’t realize it during book club, stories of women reckoning with their experiences of rape would feature prominently in my pandemic-induced year of rest and relaxation. Roberta has not avenged her rape-nor is there any way to undo the toll that such a violation wreaks on victims-but she has regained power, even if only by taking a sandwich that wasn’t hers to take. “You must be really embarrassed you just explained feminism to me.” “You must be really embarrassed,” I said. Then, with my mouth full, I began to speak. I made a full-bodied sound to demonstrate my pleasure. I felt the tiny slices of chili deliciously tingle my lips. I wrapped both hands around it and took a large bite before he could protest. Arnold received it because he had no choice and watched as I lifted up his bánh mì and deposited it in front of myself.

I don’t know why I asked for it.” Williams elaborates: Can we switch please? I don’t want this soup. In a cafe, in a particularly characteristic move, Arnold mansplains the dangers of using the label “feminist.” When the server arrives with their food-a watercress soup for Roberta and a bánh mì for Arnold-something shifts. Toward the end of the novel, years after her breakup with Arnold, Roberta agrees to meet him for lunch.

What seems, on premise, like an almost indulgent tale of food, friendship, and female debauchery, is in fact a story of women convening in the wake of trauma to create a safe space. Over the course of the novel, the reader gets glimpses into Roberta’s backstory: her father left when she was young, she was raped by an acquaintance at university, and she was in a relationship with an emotionally and psychologically manipulative older man named Arnold. “What could violate social convention more than women coming together to indulge their hunger and take up space?” Roberta muses. Together, they form a supper club, a space for women to eat as much as they desire. The novel is about Roberta, a young and somewhat lost woman who forms an intense friendship with a woman named Stevie, a quirky artist who is everything Roberta is not-brash, self-assured, magnetic. I selected Lara Williams’s debut novel Supper Club, which I’d recently read, because I thought a book that centered on women gathering in person would offer some vicarious comfort in a time of so much loneliness and uncertainty. When we started sheltering in place at the beginning of the pandemic, in a burst of energy and optimism I haven’t experienced since, I started a social distance book club. Sign up for our newsletter to get submission announcements and stay on top of our best work.

I may destroy you stealthing