Piglet by Lottie Hazell
“He would tell her thirteen days before their wedding, and she would feel his words lodge like a shard of bone between her ribs.”
Food is at the heart of Piglet (2024), British writer and scholar Lottie Hazell’s debut novel. Our main character, the eponymous Piglet, is obsessed with food – an obsession that gave her the nickname she’s borne since childhood. The novel opens with Piglet planning and hosting a dinner party to celebrate the recent purchase of her and her husband-to-be’s new home. Assistant editor at a cookbook publishing house, homeowner in Oxford, and engaged to upper-class Kit, Piglet’s life appears perfect, idyllic – just as she painstakingly curates it. Two weeks before her wedding, this will all come crashing down.
From the opening chapter, it is clear that appearances are everything to Piglet; while shopping for ingredients for the meal, Piglet imagines: “There would be cold wine and open windows, patio doors thrown wide. It would all look and taste exquisite.” She cooks a roast chicken, despite it being the middle of summer, because she “once heard Nigella say something about a house only being home once a chicken was in the oven.” She creates a complex dessert from a cookbook she is editing, purely for the opportunity to name-drop the author. For Piglet, food is a signifier, a way of conveying status to those around her that she is worlds away from her working-class roots in Derby.
Piglet’s obsession with appearances highlights her difficult – and often uncomfortable to read – relationship with class and her family. She scolds her mother, telling her to “talk properly”, and is ashamed of the way her parents serve Viennetta for dessert unironically. Checking prices on menus and suggesting Pizza Hut for a family dinner, her parent’s world is at odds with that of her future in-laws, who live the kind of life Piglet so desperately tries to forge for herself. She regards her parents with embarrassment and pity, distancing herself both physically and emotionally.
Piglet’s best friend, Margot, is “literally the only one” to call Piglet by her real name instead of her discomforting moniker. Once we learn the story behind the nickname, and witness her occasional binge-eating behaviours, the term becomes even more jarring: a cruel taunt instead of an endearing sobriquet. The name is as inescapable to the reader as it is to Piglet herself, whose real name is only used once, in the novel’s final pages.
The novel’s driving plot point is Kit’s mysterious betrayal, confessed to Piglet thirteen days before they are due to wed. The chapters of the novel count down to the wedding, as Piglet’s life spirals out of control and we are left desperate to know whether the wedding will go ahead.
“How do you tell people, when the invitations have been sent, the crème pâtissière made, that the fullness of your life has been a pretence; your pleasures, you realise, posture?”
Where Piglet excels is in the masterful way Hazell conveys mood and tension through descriptions of food. Most scenes revolve around meals or cooking: a strained family dinner; an uneaten bowl of porridge; a tray of sausages burning in the oven. One of the most memorable scenes is when Piglet creates three wedding croquembouches, alone. While earlier passages dedicated to food descriptions are luscious, conveying Piglet’s obsession with perfection, here Hazell conjures breathtaking tension, and Piglet’s fragile state of mind, through her descriptions.
“She was proud, in a way, that she could still smile as the delicious life she had been savouring turned maggoty in her mouth.”
While Piglet’s mental wellbeing deteriorates, depicted through scenes of binge-eating in restaurants and increasingly self-destructive behaviours, the downfall of our snobbish and oftentimes unlikeable protagonist does not feel triumphant. Piglet is self-absorbed, self-righteous, and obsessed with appearances. However, she is also a woman who has been told to want more, try harder, excel, all her life. Having tried to create the perfect life, Piglet must reckon with the fact that perhaps her focus on self-presentation has caused her to lose touch with who that actual self is along the way. She is left grappling with what kind of life she actually wants – and how much she is willing to sacrifice for it.
Macey Smart is a writer and editor from lutruwita/Tasmania. She recently graduated from the University of Tasmania with First Class Honours in English, with a research project on women and food in contemporary literature. You can find her work in Togatus, where she was the Deputy Editor for 2023, as well as swim meet lit mag and Playdough Magazine.