Lottie Hazell

Outside of a childhood nickname she can’t shake, Piglet’s rather pleased with how her life’s turned out. An up and coming cookbook editor at a London publishing house, she’s got lovely, loyal friends and a handsome fiancée, Kit, whose rarefied family she actually, most of the time, likes, despite their upper-class eccentricities. One of the many, many things Kit loves about Piglet is the delicious, unfathomably elaborate meals she’s always cooking.

But when Kit confesses a horrible betrayal two weeks before they’re set to be married, Piglet finds herself suddenly…hungry. The couple decides to move forward with the wedding as planned, but as it nears, and Piglet balances family expectations, pressure at work, and her quest to make the perfect cake, she finds herself increasingly unsettled, behaving in ways even she can’t explain. Torn between a life she’s always wanted and the ravenousness that comes with not getting what you know you deserve, Piglet is, by the day of her wedding, a mess, but also ready to look beyond the lies we sometimes tell ourselves to get by.

A stylish, uncommonly clever novel about the things we want and the things we think we want, Piglet is both an examination of women’s sometimes complicated relationship with food, and a celebration of the messes life sometimes makes for us.

A Novel

Piglet

Laura Dobie

When she took him to meet her parents on an Easter weekend it was not only her old bedroom - now inhabited by her sister, Franny, and her boy- friend, Darren – that felt small. It was the house, the town, the minds of the neighbours, the minds of her parents. Their easy way- their yellow custard in a Pyrex jug on the small dining table draped in doilies - embarrassed her. She found herself muttering apologies to Kit, making unkind asides about her parents' conversation when he did not respond, and, when he lay his hand over hers, and told her, 'Enough,’ her insides had withered: paper, burning, curling into ash. In the space where she was both at once her parents' daughter and Kit's fiancée, she did not know how to be.

I love all the incidental, context-specific food descriptions.

'One second,’ Sandra lifted a finger, not looking at Piglet. She pulled a bowi from a bottom desk drawer and stood up to retrieve an open box of Dorset Cereals muesli. As she poured out a torrent of oats and dried fruit she looked at Piglet, im- patient. 'So?'

FOR SEVEN SATURDAYS in a row, Piglet and Cecelia had spent an hour a week in a high-ceilinged room with a man who spoke in the third person - 'Ryan thinks you can do better', 'Ryan wants you to push really hard now', 'Ryan likes that’ - and whose trapezius muscles were so large they bulged like melons.

The sun was up by the time she reached Paddington. She found the daylight relentless and had the urge to burrow, to be under. ground. At the Praed Street traffic lights, where she usually turned left to walk through Hyde Park and on to the ofice, she turned right in the direction of the gaping mouth of the Bakerloo line. Down, down, down she went with the other Monday commuters, the other unhappy jostlers shuttled in from outside the city. She turned right, southbound, and was funnelled further underground. Three tubes passed before the tide of people pushed her to the front, presenting her body like a stone washed up on a shore. In the carriage, people pressed against her.

She had been arriving first in the office. This way, she had time to rehearse speaking, practise smiling, before her colleagues started to file in, Toni nodding, rolling her eyes at the weather, the Northern line, the bus. She had time, if she wanted, to let silently slip down her face, drip onto her pile of submis- sions, little circles of salt water wrinkling the paper.

eariy, SIle She edged forward, walking among the tables. The benches full, some people having to stand, juggling their fried chicken with their phones. There were young men who talked too loudly, laughed with their mouths full, and wore round, tortoiseshell glasses; glamorous women in their fifties and sixties, lunching and drinking; and au pairs with charges no older than twelve, who ate salt-beef bagels, cacio e pepe, and laksa. As she walked, smelling the air, stepping over discarded napkins, Piglet imagined what life might have been like, how different it could have been, if she had been eating food like that at their age. She stopped.

He stirred something at one end of the van while calling over his shoulder to the final man, who was positioned by a cash register, his arms waving like a conductor's. Piglet moved closer and watched as the man stationed by the register produced a shining, palm-sized piece of dough. He dipped it under the van's counter– for more oil, she supposed-before flattening the round, pale ball and then wiping it, as if he were scrubbing a window, palm flat, mnoving in circular motions. He pulled his hands down, the disc of dough lengthening, before pinching it between two fingers and swinging it towards the counter like a matador's cape. The dough stretched to a membrane as the man continued to slap it onto the counter and in seconds it was vast: the hide of an animal stretched over shining stainless steel. In one fluid motion he folded the dough in half, one way and then the other. With loose wrists, bored, he threw the dough - now gathered, layered, almost back to its original size – to one side.

Piglet felt the apples of her cheeks lift and knew, in a way, that Margot had started to put her back together, the cracks of herself papered over; her heart, newly knotted with scar tissue, closed to confession.

She shrugged, jubilant in her unpleasantness. The women laughed, and began to speak louder and louder, competing to tell their own anecdotes about the time, once, when they were disgusting.

Kelly returned to her table with another waitress before Piglet had time to catalogue the other diners: the kissing couple who were compensating for something, the lunching women laughing too loudly. This was something she and Toni sometimes liked to do at book launches: which author is a bigot? Which is known for sliding into the direct messages of teenagers on Twitter? 'Problematic bingo,' Toni called it, ‘where all the winners are still old white dudes.’

Piglet quotes

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