Lara Williams > Quotes

“Delia Smith calls it ‘tart’s pasta’. Italian American restaurants call it ‘whore’s pasta’. But Nigella Lawson calls it ‘slut’s spaghetti’, and that’s the one I prefer. Because there’s nothing more terrifying than a woman who eats and fucks with abandon.”
― Lara Williams, Supper Club

“We resumed staring at the table, a shared migraine of hyperemotion. When our food arrived, we ate it in silence. There was a horrible moment when I dropped my fork, slopping undercooked egg down my top, expecting an eye roll from Stevie, but she pretended not to notice. When we were finished, the bill arrived unasked for, and I thought, This is it. I am never going to see this person again.”
― Lara Williams, Supper Club

“The responsibility of getting it right, day after day, minute after minute. How was anyone supposed to be alive? The answer presented itself to me, a red-and-white sign. They drink.”
― Lara Williams, The Odyssey

“At home I googled him compulsively. I still didn’t understand why I’d been dumped, whether I had actually been dumped—whether that was even the right word. In lieu of answers, I had only a blank canvas, and I threw everything at it—every color and shade of tormented emotion—and what I was left with was black, a black wall of my own inadequacy. There is something bottomless about inadequacy, like you will never quite reach the limits of your own insufficiency.”
― Lara Williams, Supper Club

“Once I knocked on her door to find her lying facedown on her bed, listening to “Dying” by Hole on repeat. It was hard to know what she wanted. Like me, she could scream, Leave me alone! and Where are you going? in the same breath. My tactic was to wait forty-five minutes, then ask if she wanted a cup of tea. Sometimes I would set a timer on my phone. Often I would have to remind myself to breathe deeply, that it would all be over soon.”
― Lara Williams, Supper Club

“I noticed Arnold’s hand, balled into a fist at his side. He’d nearly finished his whiskey. A tear rolled down my cheek, but I was too scared to catch it, feeling it slide down my neck and land on the skin beneath my T-shirt. And I understood, for the first time, there could be an anger that was different from fists and yelling, that was beyond those things entirely.”
― Lara Williams, Supper Club

“At least when working in customer service there was the acknowledgment of artifice in your interactions. In an office you had to pretend even to your colleagues that that’s just how you were. Smiling and willing and more or less eager to please. It was exhausting.”
― Lara Williams, The Odyssey

“I crossed my legs and thought about how I was both exactly the same person I used to be and exactly a completely different sort of person, too.”
― Lara Williams, Supper Club

“But no sex workers. Never sex workers. She began feeling almost resentful at his inactivity, thinking about all the well-dressed businessmen who ordered champagne and chateaubriand who wouldn’t patch through their wives’ telephone calls—did he really think he was better than them?”
― Lara Williams, Supper Club

“I thought about how exhausting it must be to settle for nothing less than perfection because you had the capacity to obtain it.”
― Lara Williams, Supper Club

“I felt the weight of myself press into the carpet. I thought about how I was carrying only that weight, how I was responsible for no weight other than my own. All I had to carry through life was myself. I wished someone had told me that sooner.”
― Lara Williams, Supper Club

“I felt light of foot walking over, though when I saw the shop’s front door, I got the familiar but unnameable sensation of melancholy and regret. It took a few moments to get myself together before I remembered to smile and do my rounds, to transform anxiety into excitement.”
― Lara Williams, The Odyssey

“I thought about what I’d said, about not wanting to be with anyone else, and realized I hadn’t even considered being with anyone else, that it hadn’t occurred to me at all. I wondered if that meant I loved him very much or not enough.”
― Lara Williams, Supper Club

“Beyond our group, we still had to deal with the same old stuff. Unwanted and unsolicited advice came regularly. You shouldn’t be wearing that. Could you try eating this? Perhaps if you cut out carbs. Doctors presumed any ailment or illness was on account of our weight gain. And then the caustic looks from strangers. Eyes on us when we took the bus or went shopping, feasting on our bodies as on a meal. The sometime tutting as we squeezed past them or the staring in the supermarket, rolling their eyes to demonstrate their condemnation should we buy biscuits or bread. If we dared wear something fitted or tight, we would be gazed at with open horror, as if these strangers were personally aggrieved we weren’t shrouded in linen. It was as if we’d been entitled to a specific mass, and anything beyond that became public property. It was oppressive. It was upsetting. It was a total fucking drag. Sometimes I would wake up in the morning confronted by the fleshy expanse of my stomach and feel a momentary panic—the lurching anxiety of remembering that you have missed the deadline for renewing your passport or that you are alive and will one day die. I would remind myself that it was completely fine, that I was accepted and I was loved.”
― Lara Williams, Supper Club

“I once heard that a good way to cope with anxiety is to just pretend it is excitement. The body’s articulation is the same either way. You can trick your brain into practically anything.”
― Lara Williams, The Odyssey

“The only time I felt like a fraud was when a customer would ask me a question and I would look blankly at the girls until one of them intervened. But generally I understood why I was the manager and they were not. It was because I was a natural leader.”
― Lara Williams, The Odyssey

“She told me she was going to prick me to make sure the anesthetic had worked. I felt pressure but no pain. My life would have been a lot more straightforward, I thought, if I could feel only pressure but no pain.”
― Lara Williams, The Odyssey

“I thought back to my old apartment, my life with my husband, how consumed I was by need. How it was the only thing keeping me going. How the getting never really felt as good as the wanting, but the not-getting felt fucking catastrophic. I must be better, I thought. I must be good. I mentally repeated the refrain. I must be better. I must be good. Voices from my past life periodically interrupted but I drowned them out, thinking in a louder, more urgent voice. I must be my best self. Best self. Best self.”
― Lara Williams, The Odyssey

“When we’d had a long talk or spent the day comfortably not talking at all, I wanted to clap and shout, Look at this! This is happening! It was like falling in love. I’d imagine conversations with her on the walk to work, in the shower, before I fell asleep. I’d narrativize my day for her, collating observations and thoughts I’d hope to share with her later. Sometimes I felt I was performing for her when she wasn’t even there. I’d put on music I thought she might approve of while cooking my dinner. I’d dress for her even when we weren’t meeting up.”
― Lara Williams, Supper Club

“But I was always happy to come home. There was a sense of order there. Everything closed at five, so you knew where you were.”
― Lara Williams, Supper Club

“Okay, so it’s all connected,” I conceded. “Like I said before about the dumpster-diving? It’s about existing in spaces we’re told we shouldn’t exist in or how we behave in spaces that expect us to behave a certain way, to be a certain thing—and what if we don’t want to be that thing? What if we don’t want to behave in that way? And then what if actually everywhere is one of those restrictive spaces? What if the whole world is designed to inhibit you and just to exist in it is to break some deep taboo? So what if you give up making yourself smaller all the time, like all the time, and you make yourself bigger instead? And what if, to make space for yourself to be bigger, you have to take it?”
― Lara Williams, Supper Club

“When I’d finished talking, she stared into space for a long while. “It reminds me of a joke,” she said. “The one about the wife and the mistress.” “How does it go?” I asked. “Your wife and your mistress are both drowning. Who do you save? Your mistress. Because your wife will never understand. Or your wife. Because your mistress will always understand.” “I don’t get it.” “Exactly,” she replied. “Exactly.” I felt so sad that she didn’t understand. My cool aunt Hetty, of all people. She’d once called us at midnight from San Antonio, announcing, “I think I just got engaged!” Another time she dropped off the radar for weeks, until eventually my mum rang to find out what was going on, and she replied, “Oh, yeah, I just got really into engines. Been dead busy learning about the different kinds of engines.”
― Lara Williams, Supper Club