Sweet Desserts

by Lucy Ellmann

Suzy Schwarz has learnt one or two things about life: other people know how you should live better than you do; sisters (especially Fran) can destroy your sanity and self-esteem; lust calls for careful timing because it rarely coincides with that of your partner; and most heartbreaking of all, parents die on you, leaving you grieving. The only thing that provides constant solace when times are bad (and they usually are) is food.

Genres: Fiction, Novels, Literary Fiction

160 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1989

About the author

Lucy Ellmann was born in Evanston, Illinois, the daughter of biographer Richard Ellmann and writer Mary Ellmann (née Donahue). She moved to England at the age of 13 and was educated at Falmouth School of Art (Foundation degree, 1975), Essex University (BA, 1980), and the Courtauld Institute of Art (MA, 1981).

Her highly-praised autobiographical first novel, Sweet Desserts, was awarded the Guardian Fiction Prize. Both her second book, Varying Degrees of Hoplessness, and her third, Man or Mango?, were shortlisted for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, while her fourth, Dot in the Universe, was longlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction and shortlisted for the Believer Book Award.

Lucy Ellmann is a regular contributor of articles on art and fiction to Artforum, Modern Painters, the Guardian, the Listener, the New Statesman, and the Times Literary Supplement. She is also a screenwriter and was a Hawthornden Fellow in 1992.

Reviews

[Monika · Rating 3 out of 5]

I randomly selected Sweet Desserts by Lucy Ellmann as my next read. I picked it up. I read. I laughed; I clicked my tongue in sympathy. Somehow, I finished reading the book. I read articles and interviews concerning the author. I read a few reviews. However, even after doing everything that I normally do after finishing a book, I am still not sure if I want to talk about this book. It was not bad, but it was nothing special either. A recounting of the lives of two sisters, especially the younger ones’, was sometimes put on hold for a few passing seconds to tell the reader that there is a world beyond. The two sisters, like their father, are art historians. Simultaneously, they are exploring their romantic and/or sexual interest. That’s it, that’s nearly everything I took away from this book. Even though my first experience has not been what I had expected it to be, I am still looking forward to reading more by Ellmann.

[Tony Vacation · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lucy Ellmann was another gem I uncovered (thanks to the prolonged prodding of Mr MJ Nicholls) during my two month hiatus from reviewing. So I won't be writing reviews praising her two wild, rambunctious novels Dot in the Universe and Doctors and Nurses, but believe you me when I swear that they are both dark, dark (darker than "dark, dark", truthfully) comedies featuring bawdy sex, madcap murder, grotesque female protagonists, people being reincarnated as possums, purse humping, unhinged bouts of eating, adultery, incest, love's last gasps, and a list of all the many diseases that can (and will) kill us all eventually. Sweet Desserts is Ellman's much less frenetic debut, written without the rude, crude and loud (as in many words chosen at the author's discretion and made to pop off the page in ALL CAPS!) stylings that made the two novels mentioned above such violently funny and deadly serious takedowns of how fucked-up gender expectations are for women in a supposedly "equal" western world. From what I gather, this novel functions as an autobiography, but in the form of fiction with an emphasis on self-loathing, sibling cruelty, parents dying and overeating. Ellmann's wonderful any-insane-thing-goes mentality can only be glimpsed on the horizon, as this novel is written in a politer (for Ellmann, at least) more well-behaved style, featuring only light play with POV and some non-sequitur insertions of recipes, ads, poems, and jingles to show off Ellmann's post modern chops. Not the place to start for first-timers. So which of her novels should you fly through first? Christ, aren't you paying attention?!

[Doug · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ellmann's award-winning debut novel shows glimmers of the vitriol and fun to come in her later works. It is at least semi-autobiographical, since Lucy is clearly based on the author herself, and the dying father is surely Richard Ellmann (who indeed died the year before this was initially published). The interpolation of bits and pieces from outside sources doesn't QUITE work here, I don't think, but she hones those skills further on in her career. Not a major work, but short and sweet.

[L.S. Popovich · Rating 5 out of 5]

The third book in my Lucy Ellmann readathon.
This was her debut, and is less scathing, more touching, but no less readable. So far, my ranking is:

1. Dot in the Universe
2. Varying Degrees of Hopelessness
3. Sweet Desserts

All of them have pluses and minuses. This one was the most like Joy Williams. Flashes of insight abound in this day-to-day recounting of the narrator's struggles in marriage, motherhood, and the inconsistencies of everyday exertions. The incessant men "making passes" at the narrator is either wishful thinking or a feminist agenda. Either way, it's humorous. The dark dalliances are interspersed with brilliant, quirky and unexpectedly heartfelt observations on everything from Art History to baking.

The disappointments in love, the post-modern psyche out sessions, the fixations and cruelty of language, friends and strangers makes for entertaining reading in the vein of Tao Lin. Ellmann is clearly head and shoulders (and torso and hips and groin) above most practitioners of Realism working today.

A charming first novel. She has not yet taken the gloves off, but she is still ferocious.

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lucy's debut novel features middle-class underachievers drifting through life in varying degrees of hopelessness, love, resentment and anger.

This little novel is fruity though lacks the bilious rage of her other works.

[Alex · Rating 4 out of 5]

Highly readable. Charming, funny, and sad.

Towards the end of the novel a jumbled excerpt from Claes Oldenburg's "I Am For..." appears:
I am for art covered with bandages. I am for art that limps and rolls and runs and jumps.
I am for all art that takes its form from the lines of life itself, that twists and extends and accumulates and spits and drips, and is heavy and coarse and blunt and sweet and stupid as life itself.

It's immediately undercut, because this is a very ironic bit of writing, but the sentiment certainly feels like the beating heart of this book.

[Charlotte · Rating 3 out of 5]

So perfectly random and randomly perfect

[Namita Krishnamurthy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I discovered this talented woman after reading portions of 'Ducks, Newburyport' in 2019. As always, fuelled, by my obsession with novels that speak of the many glories of food. For starters, Lucy Ellmann is a very unreadable writer. Atleast for me, the style/form and subtext implied in the style/form stands too boldly over the content itself - which is not a bad thing at all - but with Ellmann it becomes increasingly dodgy with every page. The novel is littered with digressions, snippets from recipes and newspapers, bad dad jokes, academic thinkpieces.

But there is something so compelling about this book, in the same way the protagonist Suzy herself is compelled to consume these mundane humdrums of city life. At some point, she is unable to read anything but personal ads, menus, recipes, death notices, newspaper fine print, the backs of pickle jars. Her association with the world is through its objects alone, which in itself marks a deliberate disassociation from the world they belong to. She eats bread not out of desire as much as need: to use things, eat food, fuck men. Suzy doesn't have desire to do these activities as much as she cultivates these activities to induce desire. Where does disassociation take women in the twenty first century? What is "feminine mystique" for a postfeminist cultural economy? Collage, collage, collage. So perhaps the style is justified. Perhaps it is also justified that Fran's eating disorder is mentioned, and that too with such casual abandon ONCE in the entire book.

So that is my takeaway from 'Sweet Desserts'. Maybe we cannot write entire books about our bodies. Maybe it is best to have them lurk from the corners of the pages, a bulge or tire leaking from the edges; not because the book cannot contain our bodies, not because there is too much of it, but because even the slightest excess, the smallest bump, and the most innocent candour is enough to announce an apology for owning them.

[Phil · Rating 2 out of 5]

What an odd little book this is. More depressing than The Bell Jar, but with as many comical quips as a Kathy Lette book. Ultimately, I wasn't sure what to make of it. The novel has no plot, as such, being the story of two sisters Suzy and Fran (Suzy, the younger of the two, narrates most of the time) growing up in Michigan until their mother dies in their teens, when their Art Historian father ups sticks and takes them away to live on Oxford, England.

My trouble is that Suzy is so put upon by everyone - her father, her elder sister, her boyfriend. After she has a baby and divorces Jeffrey she falls into a series of sexual encounters, all of which are disappointing, and often with a passivity that makes some of the the supposedly consensual matches border on assault. There's no hope, there's no path, there's no denouement, there's no change - at the end Suzy's just as passive, taken for granted and overlooked as at the beginning.

The author (daughter of literary biography Richard Ellmann) inserts snatches of advertising puff, poetry and self-help manual instructions in between paragraphs, but too often these simply seemed random or seemed desperately wanting to be modish.

Perhaps my disappointment was because the cover and the plaudits by Clive James and Fay Weldon made this seem a jolly, comic book but the sadly bleak life of Suzy depressed me more than Sylvia Plath's novel about suicide.

(#31 in my Year of Reading Women)

[George · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars. A humorous, quirky, original short, semi autobiographical novel about Suzy Schwarz and her older sister Franny. The family move from the USA to England when the sisters are in their early teenage years and their mother dies. There’s lots of boyfriends and sex. It’s about a young woman trying to work out what life has to offer and how particular events have an impact on her life.

Here’s a random example of the author’s writing style:
‘I threw myself into my love fair with Chris. We would meet after school and walk around holding hands and periodically passionately embracing for tight-lipped kisses (we’d tried French kissing but decided against it). Despite all of Franny’s world-weary advice that I should play hard-to-get, I found myself quite incapable of working up convincing feminine wiles.’

[Alice Gould · Rating 4 out of 5]

I tend to struggle with disjointed narratives, yet Ellman managed to skillfully utilise alternate sources and quotes throughout the novel in a way that was witty and added to the story, rather than distracting from it.

Despite mostly tracking a woman's depression, Sweet Desserts is witty and funny - and incredibly raw.

[Vel Veeter]

Lucy Ellmann made a splash this year by being nominated for the Booker Prize and making the short list for her novel that tops out at close to 1000 pages and I think contains a single sentence of stream of consciousness in the mind of a housewife in the American midwest. This book, and perhaps her subsequent ones, set up that book in its form.

This book is also close to if not stream of consciousness of two sisters, one narrating, the other being narrated, living out the kind of odd phenomenon of Americans’ twenties in the era of post-divorce America. What I mean by this is when you read novels, especially by women, but plenty by men, from the 1960s and 1970s especially, there’s this kind of presence of marriage as an inevitability that permeates so many novels. By this time, and plenty of times earlier, it becomes clear that there’s a shift in the cultural expectations. That’s not to say that many if not most American women still faced (still face?) that same pressure, but there’s been some kind of releasing of some amount of that pressure.

This book then narrates what used to be a decade of marriage or missed marriage through the consciousness of someone still trying to figure out what that period can be used for. In addition, there’s the added anti-capital statelessness feelings that come with being a perpetual grad student. If you’ve ever been single and a full-time grad student, perhaps you’ve felt this of looking without finding, of not really looking and finding simulacra, or of not looking and still feeling lost in the the more staid parts of adult life you can get with being a grad student.

[Maureen Verzin · Rating 3 out of 5]

A strange book. 😊 This book has no plot as most books do – it is a narrative of someone’s life, and her family’s. Everyday happenings are narrated in the most entertaining way, be it food, food consumption, sex, feelings, love, bodily functions, life and death… The story is interspersed with non sequiturs, mostly pertaining to local and current happenings, news, or newspaper clippings, others appearing random. It’s a short story, although it covers the life of Suzy, the narrator, from birth to around late thirties. I had never read this author before, but I will look out for more of her books.

[Kyle · Rating 4 out of 5]

“One goes on needing a book right up to death — it’s almost inevitable that every keen reader in the world will die in the middle of one, pages left unturned.”

Glad I’m not dead (yet)!

I first encountered Lucy Ellmann’s work with the 2019 publication of DUCKS, NEWBURYPORT. If, like me, you were reluctant to read a ~1000 page book made up of a single run-on sentence and are by now fed up with Sally Rooney, then: READ THIS BOOK!

There is a lot to love about this book. It’s a perceptive, funny, and melancholic collection of vignettes of the lives of two sisters (Suzy and Franny). SWEET DESSERTS is a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age novel told primarily from Suzy’s perspective. The novel is told in fragmentary vignettes with recurring motifs structured non-linearly. Within these vignettes are interjected non-literary excerpts (cooking instructions, lyrics, jokes, poems, angry letters, love letters, confessions, diary entries, magazine advertisements for food products and sexual partners, excerpts from Suzy’s and Franny’s Art History PhD, etc etc).
I also enjoyed how the collage-like form of the novel reflects the content. Suzy, like her sister, is doing a PhD in Art History, writing a dissertation on collage entitled ‘The Withdrawal Method: the Absence of the Artist’s Touch in Collages and Ready-Mades.’ Ellmann is able to playfully skewer the meaning of otherwise uninteresting written excepts by sandwiching them in between different contexts. Cooking instructions inserted within sex scenes can read like eroticism. Medicinal ingredients can read like a poetic stanza.

One predominant motif throughout the novel (and the lives of Suzy and Franny) is the issue with food and weight. I mention this, in part, for Ellmann’s attention to language. In particular, I loved how Ellmann foreshadows the struggle with food and body-image by describing child-Franny as “plumpety” as well as the more concrete image evoked by the singular observation of “knuckle dimples.”
Or, how Ellmann draws a parallel between Suzy’s first and failed sexual encounter with the very moment she was unwillingly moved to England from Illinois: “Chris stood above me and unzipped his jeans, showing me his penis for the first time. He tried to coax it into action, and said to me, ‘You’re beautiful.’ But his penis was not convinced — I flew to England a virgin.”

[Liralen · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm beginning to think that I'm not the right reader for these grim little 90s books (this was first published in the late 80s, but...close enough), with the characters' dislike of everyone around them and a choice of language designed to shock and titillate. This particular book is packed with seemingly random snippets of text from ads and radio shows and instruction manuals and notices; they were interesting enough for a while, when I thought they might have some sort of Greater Meaning connected to the plot, but...I think this is it:

I knew I was in a bad way when I could no longer read a book. I couldn't even get through the first sentence of a book. Never since my first painful exposure to Aesop had I been without the burden of a book.

The only things I could read now were personal ads, TV guides, problem pages, recipes, technical handbooks, and junk mail... (106)

I actually relate to that to a certain extent (as somebody who is never without a book in hand but will, if desperate, resort to reading the backs of cereal boxes, the ingredient list on the box of Pflegetücher that sits on my table, etc.; and as somebody who also knows that if I can't read, I am Quite Ill), but eventually I tuned out the random snippets in the book because they were just...random. Sometimes with marginal connections to the text, yes, but I'm not really sure what they were meant to do beyond that.

I don't know. The book ends with the death of a character who is important to the main characters but not to the reader: there is confusion and grief and then the book is just...over. It got quite good reviews at the time, but...I'm no literary critic, and less interested in grim and gritty, and the experimental-ish nature of the writing / lack of characters I felt any connection with / lack of a satisfying ending did not resonate with me.

[Robert Watson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Quirky, funny and often very random. A real delight.
I had come to this after reading “ducks,newburyport” keen to work out how Lucy Ellmann could possibly have written such an immensely unconventional epic. I can certainly see elements of her humour here and also her love of pulling all sorts of unrelated things together on the page.
Loved the index- how silly it is and coming ,as it does, immediately after the death of her father.
Can’t wait to read her full back catalogue.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

This vaults Ellmann into the ranks of my favorites. I was pretty sure she was on her way there already, as our book club works its slow way through Ducks, Newburyport. I'm loving that brilliant book 400 pages in, so much I needed to see what else she was up to. This is a spare, unsparing work that somehow manages to grapple with the classic major themes in a fresh and witty way, all in less than 150 pages. Remarkable.

[Andrew · Rating 3 out of 5]

Going from Ducks, Newburyport to Sweet Desserts is likely to cause whiplash. The two characters are so wildly different that you can't help but wonder how the same mind conjured them up.

Sweet Desserts is often funny, frequently crass, extremely carnal, and always reminding the reader about the importance of physical touch. An easy, brief read that may not linger in your mind, but you'll certainly enjoy your time with it.

[Mike Davies · Rating 4 out of 5]

A signal of even greater things to come

I love Lucy Ellmann's writing style, it's quirkiness (a word I use as a positive quality) and personal reflections. Interesting to read this after Ducks, Newburyport. A very good book but somehow made even more stimulating reading it knowing what the author didn't know at that time.

[Marcella · Rating 4 out of 5]

This tiny novelette was so great. Reading it is sort of like reading a bunch of papers you found on the countertop, mostly journal pages mixed in with bits from women's magazines and letters from your sister and who knows what else. It paints such a good portrait of a lady living her life and dealing with her issues.

[Alice Yong · Rating 2 out of 5]

Much to my chagrin this book is terribly monotonous. The title and blurb lured me in - I thought food or dessert would feature significantly in the story but nada. Instead it was a despondent tale about two sisters who were as different as chalk and cheese, and their messy lives. Boredom set in and I couldn’t force myself to finish the remaining chapters.

[Ricky Carrigan · Rating 3 out of 5]

In 2019 Lucy Ellmann published her masterpiece, and my no-brainer book of the year and personal Pulitzer recipient—Ducks, Newburyport. That book completely blew me away. It’s a force of nature, an absolute wildfire of a novel.
The embers of that book can be found in Sweet Desserts, a lovely early (1988) novel by Ellmann.

[Nur Huda · Rating 5 out of 5]

The character suzy was written in such a daringly honest voice (about her body, her ignorance in matters, and her thirst for action) which reflects a certain wittiness too. Artful in the way situations are narrated.

[Nkhensani]

I bought this on holiday and I think that's where it will stay.

The first 100 pages were okay, but the style was so dated that I can't remember the details. It's the kind of thing that shows the skill of a writer, but doesn't actually entertain.

[Stella Richards · Rating 5 out of 5]

even though ducks, newburyport is way more outstanding than this -- by giving sweet desserts 5 stars you only see how out of the park ellmann's more recent work is. in sweet desserts finally -- finally -- we get a fully and authentically sexual woman. with an outlandish sense of humor.

[Katie Murray · Rating 4 out of 5]

Equal parts clever and heartwrenching. Could be a little confusing with the random inserts of magazine excerpts, and I didn't get the emotional reaction I was expecting, but overall I really liked it and can't wait to read more Ellmann!

[Victoria Keogh · Rating 1 out of 5]

Reminded me so much of Dolly Alderton, the disjointed and unconnected inserts that add nothing to the story, only this book was written 30 years before!

If you enjoy Dolly Alderton then this book is for you.

[Susan Katz · Rating 2 out of 5]

Meh--I found the "interjections" (e.g., miscellaneous bits of recipes, snippets of the critique of a painting, odd medical/nutritional facts) confusing. And I really didn't care what happened to any of the characters.

[Jo-Marie · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars. -.5 mainly because I feel somewhat thick, as if I am missing the point or many points. But I love the joyful, chaotic word play and interruptions, interjections...like life, messy.

[renee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sharp, poignant, funny, and moving. A true little gem.