I Hate Hosting Dinner Parties, but I Love Watching Fictional Parties Derail

I hate dinner parties.

Whenever my parents threw their annual Christmas party, I used to hide in the hallway, sitting on the bottom tread of the stairs, listening to the muffled din. As a very shy and introverted child, any large gathering felt tremendously overwhelming: too many people, too much noise. It was the same at birthdays, anniversaries, any kind of party, really. All of these get-togethers felt entirely overwhelming, so whenever I could, I would slip quietly away and sit on the stairs, in the utility room, even on the upstairs toilet.

As a less shy but still introverted adult, throwing a dinner party, especially at Christmas, is my worst nightmare. I live alone, so to throw a Christmas party would be to single-handedly choose the menu, shop for it, cook for it, clean the house, set the table, and, finally, and worst of all, to assume responsibility for my guests’ enjoyment. But as much as I dread real-life dinner parties, I love them in film and TV.

It has taken me a while to figure out why. Of course, to enjoy a fictional situation does not mean I would enjoy it in real life. I love horror films, but wouldn’t want to be caught dead in one. And it is great fun when fictional dinner parties derail, starters burn, punches fly, and chaos inevitably reigns. But what I noticed about the fictional dinner parties I love the most is that they all have a leading role for women who go through a personal transformation.

My favourite dinner parties take place in three very well-known films and series, but to set the scene, let me recap for a second. In Sally Potter’s The Party (2017), it is Janet who organises a small party for her friends. Janet is a British politician who has just been announced as shadow minister for health, and who, despite her busy schedule, insists on “doing a Thatcher” and preparing the canapés herself. In “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” one of the best episodes of Grey’s Anatomy, Meredith invites her friends and colleagues to dinner relatively soon after her husband died. And the second series of Fleabag, of course, opens with that famous engagement dinner at a fancy restaurant, where Fleabag sees her family again after a year without contact.

While there will be many exceptions throughout the world, I would say that women are still often the ones who shop, cook, and clean for a party. What I love about the stories mentioned above is that these women either fail spectacularly at some or all of these tasks, or do not even try at all. Janet very much tries, but after finding out her husband is terminally ill, she forgets about the vol-au-vents in the oven until the kitchen fills with smoke. Meredith opens the door to welcome her colleagues and finds that one of their plus-ones is Penny, the doctor who was partly responsible for her husband’s avoidable death. Frozen with shock, transported back into the past, and unable to focus on anything or anyone else, she mixes half a margarita, then abandons any attempt at cooking or hosting altogether. At the restaurant, Fleabag at first does not contribute to her family’s conversation, refusing to paper over the rift between them with polite small talk.

There is a kind of unleashing here, one that goes beyond simple unconventionality. These three women organise or attend a dinner party, but during the course of the evening, as starters turn to mains and the fault lines between family members and friends work their way toward the surface, they do not assume responsibility for others’ feelings, enjoyment, or expectations. I imagine that they, like me, grew up in an environment where girls were to some extent expected to do just that. For a long time, I moulded my life around these expectations, chased ‘proper’ schools and ‘proper’ jobs, friends and relationships because that was what my life was supposed to look like. Between the ages of sixteen and twenty-five, I felt increasingly entangled in these unspoken rules and standards, and that only let up when I began to write novels: when I decided that trying to become a writer was a valid career to pursue. For Janet, Meredith, and Fleabag, that disentanglement is very much on show during these dinner parties.

While writing allowed me to step out of the bounds of my younger self into a person in her own right, their process of transformation, of course, looks very different. Fleabag helps her sister when she has a miscarriage, punches her brother-in-law when he makes a crude and painful joke about it, and finally reconciles with her sister. When Meredith finds out that Penny is starting work at the same hospital on Monday, she cannot help but announce to every colleague present that “perfect Penny killed my husband.” A blazing row ensues, and several of Meredith’s relationships are put under pressure, but at the end of the episode, Meredith agrees to work with Penny, and even to teach her. Janet makes to put the burned canapés into the rubbish bin outside and finds a gun there. When she finds out that Marianne, the woman she has been having an affair with, was also having an affair with her husband, she raises the gun and points it at Marianne as she is about to walk through the front door.

The culmination of these dinner parties, especially Janet’s, involves eye-opening realisations and harsh confrontations with hard truths. It is a painful process these women go through to step into themselves and see themselves and those around them clearly. It was painful for me, as it was sometimes painful for my family and friends to see that the person I was for years and years is no longer who I am, or who I want to be. But there is treasure to be found, too, in ripping the veil away and seeing what lies beneath. I hate dinner parties, but both in fiction and reality, I love them too.

Viola van de Sandt’s novel The Dinner Party is available now in hardback, ebook and audio download (Tinder Press, £20)