Alice Vincent’s fantasy dinner party: Jamaica Kincaid, Joni Mitchell and more share a luxurious meal at Sessions Arts Club

I was about as keen to have a baby shower as I was to have my hen do almost exactly a year earlier, but given the option of hosting a pure fantasy dinner party it seemed churlish to refuse. As with the hen do, I suspect I will enjoy it despite myself. 

I love hosting at home, to the extent that our search for somewhere to live was extended considerably by “the dining table test”. But given my imminent home-bound future, I choose to make the most of going out. After 18 months of failing to get a table at Sessions Arts Club, a glitch in the booking system means I have booked the entire Georgian pile for the afternoon. Martha Stewart has transported herself from 1982 to dress the table according to the cover of Martha’s Entertaining, Icelandic poppies flopping over lace napkins.

Doorstep slices of sourdough from Toklas bakery are sitting on the table, as are neat pats of room-temperature butter, glistening with salt crystals. I’ve devised a menu inspired by the food that has brought me most satisfaction during my pregnancy — the sharp, the sweet, the creamy, the carby — with a keen eye on seasonality. As a gardener with a baby due on the spring equinox, it seems fitting to celebrate its gestation with produce that is ready to harvest alongside it.

At home, I reach most often for Anna Jones’s recipe books. We’ll be eating her strozzapreti with radicchio and balsamic alongside salads of tumbled pink leaves and plates of mozzarella and blood orange drizzled with peppery olive oil and toasted fennel seeds. Pretty food to pick at luxuriously.

Having heaved myself up all the stairs, my first guests are already seated: authors Jamaica Kincaid and Avni Doshi. They’re wasting no time in making each other’s acquaintance, trading first-hand gossip about the publishing industry.

I’ve devised a menu inspired by the food that has brought me most satisfaction during my pregnancy

I have brought together women whose advice I seek on balancing those tricky demands of motherhood and creativity. Doshi placed the idea of maternal ambivalence at the heart of her searing debut novel, Burnt Sugar, which she wrote while raising two children. Kincaid has explored motherhood across her work, including in The Autobiography of My Mother. Her honesty in describing the tussle between attending to her plants and her children in My Garden (Book) helped to inform my own writing. “You don’t have to choose,” says Doshi, referring to that theoretical pram in the hall. “In the process of moulding them, you find they are actually moulding you.” Kincaid agrees with Doshi that finding the time to write is difficult with small humans to tend to. “I think they sometimes knew I was writing, or gardening, when I could be playing with them, but it was important that my children saw I was more than their mother.” This is exactly what I was hoping to hear.

For Why Women Grow I interviewed 45 women in their growing spaces and one man: Harry Hoblyn, head gardener at Charleston House, who helped me to understand what the Sussex farmhouse garden meant to painter Vanessa Bell. She arrives next, betraying the No Presents rule with a handful of flowers cut from the beds and tied up with string. Bell was as much a mother to the British abstract art movement as to her own three children. She offers the insight I have been longing to glean from her letters. “Those first few years are exhausting,” she says, filling up everyone’s glasses, “but they go so fast. Plus, I got a lot done while they slept.” The soft pencil drawings of her babies, that still hang next to her bed at Charleston, attest to this.

Finally, Joni Mitchell arrives. Aged 21, a single mother with no money or support, she felt she had no choice but to give her baby up for adoption and sing in bars instead. This experience became the song “Little Green”. “People get it wrong,” she tells us. “I didn’t give up my daughter to have a career; the music was a trick of fate, it was a smokescreen. Fortunately,” she adds, folding a freckled radicchio leaf, “I had a pretty voice.” 

Mitchell doesn’t bring her guitar. I’m too hormonal to witness such an intimate gig and not melt. She, Kincaid and Nessa (as Bell insists we call her), are chatting over the flowers.

Finally, dessert: brought by my mum in Tupperware. Flapjack and fudge slice, made by muscle memory from recipes written in my grandmother’s neat hand. She is unfazed by all the famous people and just wants to hear about what Laurel Canyon was like in the 1960s — as, frankly, we all do. I sit back and listen. The baby kicks beneath my ribs.

Alice Vincent’s “Why Women Grow” is out now with Canongate Books

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