Dinner Party: A Tragedy Review
This book comes with quite a few trigger warnings: family dysfunction, eating disorders, child death, and suicide attempts.
Sarah Gilmartin’s writing is excellent and kept me interested in the often very sad story in Dinner Party: A Tragedy. The blurb puts out some misconceptions, however. It made the book seem like there was one dinner party which spanned the entire novel, with flashbacks interspersed between courses like Three Daughters of Eve by Elif Shafak. The entire dinner party the blurb references takes place in the first chapter, and the following chapters go back in time and continue from there in chronological order.
The main character of this book, Kate, has been navigating adulthood with the grief of her deceased twin sister hanging over her. The titular dinner party takes place at her house where she invites her two brothers to remember the anniversary of their sister’s death. Their mother does not come. In the chapters following this, we go back to the childhood of Kate and her siblings, where we meet their parents. Their mother is simultaneously efficient and supportive and dangerously unpredictable, which casts a shadow over the family’s life on the rural Irish farm. Kate finds refuge from the instability of the house in her twin, Elaine. When Elaine inevitably dies, Kate and the rest of the family struggle to cope with the tragedy and spin in different directions, trying to escape the trauma.
