A Love Letter To The Literary Dinner Party

Recently, I found myself mesmerised by my friend Phoebe’s effortless hosting. As an interiors director and person of truly exquisite taste, she produced welcome nibbles in the form of hand-made cheese straws, fresh from the oven, kept my wine glass permanently half-full and served courses that induced ecstatic moaning.

At some point she must have been checking on the food, not that I noticed. Mostly, I remember how fun it was. The four of us talking long into the night, cheeks flushed from laughing so hard. All different and yet the same: we are all writers.

It got me thinking that the real magic of the moveable feast isn’t so much about the sharing of food, lovely as this is, but the sharing of stories. And that maybe, when it comes to the art of entertaining, it could not hurt to look to the literary.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, Joan Didion told TIME magazine that giving parties was the thing she missed most. The essayist’s starry gatherings in California in the late 1960s and ’70s were legendary, featuring cameos from the likes of Patti Smith and Warren Beatty. Though she did admit that “at least the wine bills have gone down”. She was known for keeping a large black binder to record every seating plan and what she served each evening:

Roast chicken with rosemary. Roasted garlic, scallions, carrots, celery. Goat cheese and brie. Olives. Bibb lettuce vinaigrette. Chocolate and almonds.  

“She cooked non-stop,” artist and Sex & Rage author Eve Babitz, wrote. “She could make dinner for 40 people with one hand tied around her back while everybody else was passed out on the floor.”

If preparing a feast for more than five friends sounds like hell, worry not. Nora Ephron – whose heartbreak novel Heartburn contains 16 culinary comforts, including a key lime pie she throws in the face of her cheating husband – kept things simple. Advising to make things easy for yourself (cook only things you know and love), don’t overreach (nobody will know you prepared the meal the day before) and consider investing in a round table (better for conversation).

Zadie Smith prefers a cocktail party. “Writers work all day alone,” Smith says. “In the evening, I like to drink and talk to people. It’s my favourite thing.” She has hosted the likes of Salman Rushdie, Hilton Als and Lena Dunham over the years.

Catching up with Lily Sullivan, New York-based writer of dating and design newsletter Love and Other Rugs and queen of the haute homey soirée, she thoroughly embraces the theatricality of it all. “I LOVE a theme,” she says, but appreciates that not everyone does (“if I do have themes, they are always optional, relaxed and humour-driven”). What of guest etiquette? Currently I’m into sending inscribed ‘thank you’ books, instead of thank you cards. Sullivan always asks guests to bring a bottle of wine, and if going to a somebody’s house she’ll bring flowers, too, and sometimes grabs something personal if it’s a friend whose aesthetic she knows well.

“I think writers tend to give good dinner party because we are storytellers, carefully crafting narratives and characters together,” Lily adds. “A dinner party is sort of like a story played out in the moment.”

It is, of course, up to you how you tell it. Whether you’re going low-key or want a vodka bottle centrepiece frozen into a brick of ice that’s embedded with flowers, a la Martha Stewart, whatever your vibe, it’s hard not to get sentimental about such scenes when you strip it back to its core. A dinner party is both delightfully innocent and bathed in an old-age glamour; where you can be in a room of people for hours and have little desire to check your phone; where you can share your secrets; where even bad food served has a certain charm. At its best, entertaining is an act of generosity. Of togetherness. I can think of two no greater joys.

5 Of The Most Memorable Hosts From Literature

1. Jay Gatsby in The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald – With a seemingly infinite supply of champagne, orchestras to soundtrack the evening and a guest list full of New York’s nouveau riche social climbers, Gatsby’s Jazz Age-set house parties were less about intimacy, more about showing off.

2. Holly Golightly in Breakfast At Tiffany’s by Truman Capote – Loud, dizzying parties, with an air of unpredictability and young social butterfly Miss Golightly at the centre of it all. Hosting style: see and be seen, wear fabulous dress, accessorise with black cigarette holder.

3. Clarissa Dalloway in Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf – For Clarissa, the wife of an MP in 1920s London, hosting is all about elegance and an acute attention to detail. Described by numerous characters as the “perfect hostess”, her party prep involves buying flowers and having a disco nap on the sofa, later entertaining the prime minister with the “air of a creature floating in its element.”

4. Bridget Jones in Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding – “V. excited about dinner party,” journals the ’90s rom-com heroine, Bridget (AKA, ‘Bridge’). “Have bought marvellous new recipe book by Marco Pierre White.” Such was the giddy pre-dins smugness before serving her friends blue soup for starters, omelette for dinner and marmalade for dessert. Iconic.

5. The Mad Hatter in Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland by Lewis Carroll – A good party is never, ever, boring. For fiction’s most eccentric of hosts, the more bizarre, the better: full of riddles and an ever-shifting seating plan.

Emma Firth is a London-based essayist and writer exploring love, intimacy and joy for British Vogue, The Cut, ELLE UK, ES magazine, Rolling Stone, mixed feelings newsletter and more