‘Stepping Into Her Shoes And Her Saucepans’ – Lottie Hazell in Conversation with Sophie Mackintosh On Her Debut Novel Piglet

Describing Lottie Hazell’s debut Piglet as a novel about a woman’s journey towards marriage feels like a disservice. Hazell uses this plotline as a means to explore the complexities of satisfaction, hunger, ambiguity, self-curation, class and domestic relationships. Hazell discussed her debut in conversation with award winning author Sophie Mackintosh at Trafalgar Square Waterstones. The author started the novel as her thesis for a Creative Writing PhD, and has since adapted it to become the novel it is today.

The novel follows Piglet in the fortnight leading up to her wedding to Kit. She has curated a perfect life for herself, filled with a new home in Oxford, dinner parties, shopping at Waitrose and her perfect fiancée. The façade soon begins to crack when Kit admits to having betrayed Piglet in a potentially unforgivable way. Piglet’s relationships with food and her fiancée are closely linked in her uses of them as means to satisfy hungers deep within herself. In marrying Kit, Piglet attempts to create a life far removed from her lower-middle class origins in Derbyshire. Hazell defined food as ‘a shorthand into a whole character’ and a true marker of class. This is particularly well expressed in the disparities between Piglet’s and Kit’s families. The night before her wedding, Piglet’s parents choose Nando’s as their dinner destination for her last night as an unmarried woman. This is far removed from wedding reception, an elegant French menu even fitted with an oyster bar, which Kit’s parents have paid for on the following day.

In discussing writing the novel, Hazell explained how she often found herself ‘stepping into [Piglet’s] shoes and her saucepans’, employing a mode of ‘method writing’, in which she cooked almost every meal alongside Piglet. The novel welcomes us into a rich world of roast chicken, carbonara, and puttanesca. We follow Piglet using food as a means to create a new identity and an attempt to satisfy deep holes within herself. The scenes which really stick with me are of Piglet binge eating in restaurants. When she visits The Golden Monkey on her lunch break, Piglet orders everything on the menu, playing food critic and justifying it as research for her job as editorial assistant at a cook book publisher. By far my favourite is when Piglet turns down lunch with her colleagues, claiming to have a pre-wedding lunch with friends booked at the Savoy. Shrouded in her lie, Piglet goes for burgers at Le Bun on her own and orders everything on the menu. As if this in itself isn’t embarrassing enough, the group of colleagues who invited her out arrive at the restaurant, catching her in the act.

Hazell’s writing is so intimate and immediate, yet simultaneously punctured with ambiguities and gaps which are never filled. Hazell discussed how this was very deliberate as she hoped for the text to become a living thing, allowing for that which goes unsaid to become a collaborate space between what she as the author has created and what the reader will imagine for narrative gaps. Typically crucial descriptions, including Piglet’s appearance, are never provided. Similarly, we never explicitly learn what Kit actually did to betray Piglet. Hazell commented that she experimented with narrating certain narrative gaps, but found that including them did not make the novel any better. As a successful result, Hazell provides us with equally as much in what is both said and unsaid in the novel.

Hazell’s descriptions of food are tantalising and visceral. In Hazell’s words, this is a book not to be read too far from the cupboard. Piglet had me at the edge of my seat in anticipation of what Piglet would do next, whilst simultaneously watering at the mouth at descriptions of beautiful recipes.

Happy reading. You will be hungry.