gluttony, which I refuse to call a sin
a review of Lottie Hazell's novel, "Piglet"
Well, this is a new one: I’m writing a book review. I guess I sort of wrote a review of “The Upstairs Delicatessen” a few months ago, but this feels more review-y. And … I liked doing it!
“Piglet” is one of the best books I’ve read this year, and it’s certainly the one that made me feel the realest, rawest emotions — about love and relationships and food and the female body.
There is a moment, in the process of icing almost any cake, when you’ll wonder: Is this enough? Maybe you have twice as much buttercream as you need — but you’ll still wonder. Worse: You don’t have enough, and you wonder, and then you’re three square inches short.
This is why, around 8 a.m. on the day of my wedding, I was hunched over my stove, whisking a sugar syrup for a Swiss buttercream. I’d already assembled two of the three layer cakes I’d baked for the party that night, and the third, biggest cake, still in two pieces, took up an entire shelf of my refrigerator. It was so much, pure excess, and it dwarfed the mound of buttercream I’d made the day before. So instead of flirting with disaster, I woke up early and whisked, joking that this was my wedding-day workout.
Later on, when it was time to ice that last cake, I didn’t need the second batch of buttercream. That was apparent quickly, so I snuck tastes here and there: a swipe of my index finger on a spatula headed for the dishwasher, a clean spoon pulled from the drawer for the sole purpose of scooping a mouthful of decadence.
In “Piglet,” Lottie Hazell’s novel about a woman’s existential reckoning in the days leading up to her wedding, the main character (nicknamed Piglet) is a cookbook editor with big plans to make her own wedding dessert. In a twist on traditional cake, she’s settled on croquembouche. Three of them. This fact is revealed early in the story, around the time readers learn Piglet’s wealthy, genial fiancé has done something unspeakably bad. Two weeks before the wedding, he reveals this transgression. Readers are left in the dark about the details. The wedding will proceed, Piglet decides. In the meantime, she feasts.
Hazell’s novel appealed to me for obvious reasons: cookbook editor, outsized wedding-related baking project, angst. The Venn diagram overlap between food writing and fiction isn’t a big one, and a lot of what’s out there is schmaltz — the non-edible kind — but given the problem of the no-good fiancé, I had high hopes this story would defy the genre. Did it ever.
“Piglet” is a matrimonial haunted house of a book; at every turn, you wonder when a sickening, sober reality will jump out for a scare. There’s a saccharine-sinister future mother-in-law, a taffeta demon of a wedding dress, a table set with seven bloody cheeseburgers for one woman. The nightmare comes to a head late in the book, early on the day of the cursed wedding, in a scene that felt, to me, like an upside-down memory. I imagined Piglet in my kitchen, with my cakes, but I could not imagine any of the white-hot feelings she felt.
Piglet is up before dawn to begin filling buns with crème pâtissière, which she’ll stack and bind with spun sugar into conical towers. She’s wearing white silk bridal pajamas, and she works, at first, with confidence.
“For a moment she stood back, awed by herself, observing the success you could have when you followed the recipe, followed the rules. Then she was dipping, sticking, smiling, and licking. Her fingers were gilded in caramel, and her tongue flashed at intervals, tasting her creation. … Halfway up the tower, she slipped a whole bun into her mouth. It exploded with custard, and her mouth watered and she held it on her tongue. She had no need to chew, her saliva dissolving the pastry, the crème slipping down her throat. It was incredible: what her body could do.”
But there’s an ugly undercurrent. The crème pât is “pale yellow and thick,” Hazell writes. “The bag could have contained anything, and Piglet thought of liposuction, women with fat lips, and the candle scenes in Fight Club.” Piglet’s consumption is almost animal; she eats “like a boa constrictor, swallowing her food whole.” All the while, she’s checking the time, listening for sounds. Her parents, sister and sister’s boyfriend are staying at her home, and she wants to cook and assemble unseen, as if her project, her hunger, is shameful.
As Piglet keeps working, she realizes she’s run desperately low on crème pât for her third croquembouche. Unlike me, she didn’t make extra — but Piglet’s problem is framed not as a lack of contingency plan, but as payback for a cardinal sin. Maybe you think she earned her snacks. But in the wedding-industrial complex, with a dress like a straightjacket hanging upstairs and a flock of guests to impress, those buns she swallowed like live mice are a transgression. So Piglet pulls “in her stomach in retribution, [snatches] at her ribs.” Her mother appears in the kitchen, then her sister, and Piglet sees herself as she expects others might: “a bride damp with perspiration and sticky with custard.” The croquembouche collapses.
Hazell is a master of choosing what to describe — and what not to. We get vivid descriptions of each bun and everything on the table when Piglet hosts a dinner party earlier in the novel. But her fiancé’s wrongdoing is opaque. And then there’s Piglet’s appearance: We know she wears glasses, at least sometimes, but that’s about it. The best description of her body comes in contrast with her sister’s.
“You have always loved your food.” her father nodded.
“And Franny’s always been a little stick of a thing,” her mother said.
The truth of the comparison is darker: Piglet, as a teenager, discovers her sister has been hiding food in their room rather than eating it. Her sister confides her eating disorder, and Piglet makes a bargain: If her sister eats a quarter of her food, Piglet will finish the rest. Piglet figures this will guarantee her sister eats more than nothing. A year later, the parents buy the sister a birthday cake, and Piglet promises their agreement will apply there, too. When the parents open the fridge, they find most of the cake gone. Years later, they tell the story as an example of Piglet’s gluttony. They can’t see past her appetite to notice the love. And Hazell’s lack of concrete descriptions challenges our assumptions and prejudices as readers, as people living in an Ozempic-ified reality. Is Piglet overweight, or is she just bigger than her too-thin sister, slightly wider than an overpriced white dress?
As I read about Piglet’s morning, I recalled the sensory experience of my own wedding day: the heat rising off the stove, the steam, the sweat under my armpits, the tang of sugar clinging to my tongue and my teeth and the corners of my lips. But my dress, unlike Piglet’s, fit. No one suggested I should have dieted. I presented as under control, thin by the grace of good genes and little else, so my acts of excess were acceptable. In my empty kitchen, I smeared leftover buttercream on a graham cracker when I was supposed to be putting on makeup.
“Piglet” is a book about the power of appetite, denied and indulged. It’s about the proper way for women to package gluttony and the ways society has condemned. Host dinner parties, do Pilates, slough the skins off a thousand chickpeas to make the perfect hummus, you’re a madonna. Suck grease from your fingers, wolf pastries, refuse a pre-wedding fast, you’re a problem. But “Piglet” tears apart that packaging and licks it clean, en route to its own kind of happy ending.
I just finished this book a few days ago and also loved it. Goodreads didnt get it, so i was happy to find your post! It's also impressive considering it's made up of mostly dialogue and food/cooking description and little else. I am recommending it to everyone I know simply because I am dying to talk about the things the author left unsaid!