Dinner Parties

Please Invite Me to Yours!

In my ideal world, I would go to or give a dinner party about once a week. In my actual world, I’m lucky if it’s three times a year.

A dinner party at somebody’s house is my favorite social occasion. There will be six to ten people, and, who knows? I might make a new friend. There will be round after round of great food. There will be, above all, good conversation: the sharing of experience, facts, ideas. Sometimes there will be a theme, a subject that dies down then flares up again half an hour later, and, once again, later on. There will be laughter. With any luck, there will be some flirtation.

Perhaps this dinner party model is based on how my mother entertained when I was young. I don’t remember her worrying much about the food, though she made it all herself and it was fine. She was concerned with the liveliness of the group and often invited a single person or two who might perk things up with the usual couples.

As I wrote in the last chapter of Just Say Yes: A Marijuana Memoir, before every dinner party, she and my stepdad, Antoine, would discuss what they should talk about: “What subjects would prompt the most interesting conversation or reveal new dimensions in their friends? My mother spends more time discussing repartee than she does getting dressed and made-up. This bit of pre-party planning they call ‘prepartee.’”

Their gatherings were always informal and lively. I don’t recall an emphasis on gourmet cuisine or matching wine glasses. It was always about the people and the fun. When I was too young to join in, from the next room I could hear the guests’ voices, sometimes overlapping—and many bursts of laughter. That was adulthood to me.

But when I became an adult, the dinner party was already dying out. There’s the occasional pot-luck dinner, but that’s usually too large and amorphous to generate the kind of badinage I crave. There are warm and wonderful family meals, but these are necessarily more predictable, less exciting. There are dinners in a restaurant with another couple, and they’re always fun—but no substitute for the dinner party, for dining at leisure in somebody’s home.

I understand why dinner parties are dying out. A dinner party is a lot of work. It’s easier to have a party for 50 than a dinner party for 6. With a dinner party you can’t just lay out a bunch of things: no, you’re busy running in and out of the kitchen carrying plates. After hors d’oeuvres in the living room, there’s a big meal in the dining room, with salad, and after that, tea and a dessert or two. Fruit. Chocolate.

It all takes a lot of shopping and cooking and cleaning, usually done by the woman. A woman without household help might not have the time or inclination for all this. Some women of my age have “retired” from cooking; some men of my age have become less sociable and are reluctant to leave home at all. Many people make other arrangements. One of my single friends eats at her yacht club twice a week, with other members (though she complains that these people are dull).

A dinner party is hard to organize. Old friends have moved far away; new friends, mostly retired, take a lot of trips, some to visit grandchildren, some to fulfill lifelong dreams while they still can. So just corralling eight people is a challenge.   

I was coming to terms with the paucity of dinner parties in my life when I got engrossed in Blake Lively’s massive biography, Philip Roth (930 pp; some 30 hours on audio).

And there they were: dinner parties every few pages! Roth seems to have met every important writer of our time, usually at a dinner party in either Manhattan or Connecticut. What their conversations must have been like!  One exchange between Salman Rushdie and Roth ended with Roth shouting “Fuck you!” Most talk, I’m sure, was deeper and wittier than that. After all, Roth dined with Bellow, Malamud, Plimpton, Mailer, DuPlessix Gray, Kundera, and various movie stars.

I have had and am having a wonderful life, and I’m deeply grateful for my general good fortune. But if were a literary lion—never mind the prizes, the accolades, the riches! If I were a celebrated novelist, I might have gone to the dinner parties of my dreams!

Illustration by Dall.E