Entertaining Disasters: A Novel (With Recipes) [Paperback]

Nancy Spiller (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 6, 2009

In print, FW, the unnamed freelance Food Writer of Nancy Spiller’s sardonic debut novel, Entertaining Disasters, 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. But 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 hostess to reality bites 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 her house implodes. In the way of Nora Ephron’s Heartburn, Spiller’s book is filled with the fabulous culinary lore and delicious-sounding recipes that have made FW’s writing such popular foodie mania. Now all she has to do is somehow bring this fantasy world into workaday reality.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The unnamed heroine of Spillers debut is an L.A. epicurean whos made a career writing about her perfect dinner parties. The only problem? She hasnt 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 heroines focus sticks mainly to the flaws in her surroundings; theres no learning or growing, just a litany of worries over the coming party, lots of blame-throwing and unhappiness. Despite Spillers 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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From Booklist

The nameless food writer who narrates this funny, satirical novel exhibits all the worst tendencies of her profession. Vain, self-absorbed, and oblivious to agendas other than her own, she begins to organize her first dinner party in a decade. Living in Los Angeles, she immediately runs into a problem with invitees who seem to manufacture excuses, who will come only if certain foods are served or not served, or who want to use the dinner party to advance their own careers—the City of Angels as the City of Angles. The writer has a substantial set of issues with her family and with her mother in particular. Each chapter includes a recipe, some utterly hilarious and undoable. Simple coleslaw carries ill-written, self-defeating instructions. A lengthy list of ingredients for an Opera cake concludes with the advice to forget all this and just go buy one at a good bakery. --Mark Knoblauch

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Product Details

• Paperback: 336 pages
• Publisher: Counterpoint (January 6, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1582434514
• ISBN-13: 978-1582434513
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,207,836 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Misleading title., February 11, 2009

By 

Scott Davis "ScottInHawaii" (Honolulu, HI United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Entertaining Disasters: A Novel (With Recipes) (Paperback)

The title is very misleading. It's more a book about the protagonist's (and I suspect the author's) dysfunctional family than preparing for the big dinner party. Why do so many books these days have to be about dysfunctional families? I'm sick of it already. The protagonist also thinks it's rocket science to throw a dinner party. Get over it. Very formulaic. If author had stuck to the one idea, the book would probably have been too short to publish.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A book you can sink your teeth into, March 2, 2009

By 

Eager Reader (Burbank, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Entertaining Disasters: A Novel (With Recipes) (Paperback)

Foodies are bound to be curious about the recipes alluded to in the subtitle of this piquant autobiographical first novel, but the ingredient lists and step-by-step kitchen instructions capping each chapter are mere snacks compared with the real meat of this tale: how and why the narrator, a freelance food writer, has come to dread the dinner parties for which she is the toast of the town. As she plans the menu for what could be the most important soiree of her career, the hostess-with-the-mostest takes us on a journey through her life, navigating modern Los Angeles with extended detours to her Castro Valley childhood growing up in a family that was anything but normal. The flashbacks are vividly and unsparingly rendered through the eyes of a young girl struggling to make sense of a home and dinner table loosely shared with an unhinged mother, a distant father, two phantom brothers and a misfit sister. Ultimately, "Entertaining Disasters" is about family and how, like food, it can bring us both pleasure and pain, and either sustain us or not.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Real Food for Thought, February 4, 2009

By 

Sean R. Mitchell (Los Angeles CA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Entertaining Disasters: A Novel (With Recipes) (Paperback)

With all the attention in the last decade to food and food culture, foodies, the Food Network and the elevation of chefs to the status of religious leaders, here comes a narrator to remind us that there is life after dinner. The wonderfully named FW is an original creation, a witty woman traveling in the fast lane of magazine food writing whose own dark back story catches up with her as she heads toward a climactic rendezvous with truth -- or the lack of it -- in what she does for a living. Ms. Spiller's winning prose style, familiar to newspaper and magazine readers on the West Coast, has never been better as she stretches out in this alternately amusing and harrowing autobiographical novel. Quite a feat -- or, more appropriately, feast.