50 pages • 1-hour read
Piglet
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Part 1, Chapters 6-10Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1, Chapter 6 Summary: “12 Days”
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of disordered eating.
The day after Kit’s revelation, Piglet wakes up feeling like a stranger in her body. Kit apologizes and makes her breakfast, but she rejects it and leaves for work without speaking to him. Rather than exiting the station when her commuter train arrives in London, Piglet walks into the Underground system and takes a random train through the city. She watches a woman eat a banh mi sandwich, spilling mayonnaise onto the shoes of another commuter.
When she arrives at the Fork House offices, she finds that Kit has sent a dozen roses and a large cookie cake with the words “Twelve Days” to her. Her officemates are impressed by the gifts, but Piglet does not contribute to the conversation. Kit sends a series of text messages, which Piglet opens to trigger read receipts, but she does not respond. When he calls at lunch, she answers but does not speak. As he apologizes, Piglet imagines how the people in her life would respond to the news of his betrayal. She tells Kit that she is not going to punish him.
After work, Piglet runs through London before commuting back to Oxford in her exercise clothes. Rather than going straight home, she goes shopping at Waitrose. When she finally arrives home, Kit admits that he was worried that she was leaving him. Piglet begins to cook dinner and asks Kit where their relationship can go. When he does not respond, she realizes that it is her choice. Kit says that he is too upset to eat and leaves to shower. Alone in the kitchen, Piglet eats both of their meals.
In the interstitial epigraph, Piglet congratulates herself for smiling through her pain.
Part 1, Chapter 7 Summary: “9 Days”
Piglet begins arriving at the Fork House offices early so that she can cry without Kit or her coworkers seeing her. She wonders whether her acceptance of Kit’s betrayal means that she doesn’t care about it or herself. Piglet’s boss, Sandra, catches her crying in the office and assumes that it’s related to the stress of the wedding and applying for the new editor position. She encourages Piglet to leave the office at lunch and dedicate the rest of her afternoon to working on her resume and job application.
Piglet leaves the office at exactly noon and walks along Southbank, a crowded touristy area on the banks of the Thames. She stops at a street food festival under the Waterloo Bridge and watches as people order and eat a wide variety of food. She becomes hypnotized by a vendor stretching and folding roti, an Indian flatbread, and joins the line. When it is her time to order, she panics and leaves.
Leaving the street fair, she turns into an Indian restaurant and asks to be seated near a window. As she pulls out her laptop, she imagines that the servers believe she is a food critic. She asks for her server’s recommendation and then orders everything on the menu, finishing it all herself. She decides to expense the meal and call it research. Afterward, she studies her body in the mirror and imagines that she is pregnant. On the train ride back to Oxford, Franny calls and asks to borrow thousands of pounds. Piglet promises to ask Kit. Despite being uncomfortably full, she eats the dinner that Kit has prepared for them at home.
The interstitial epigraph suggests that Kit and Piglet both find comfort in the lie that they are happy.
Part 1, Chapter 8 Summary: “7 Days”
Piglet’s final dress fitting is one week before the wedding. As Margot and Piglet wait for Piglet’s mother and sister to arrive, Margot reveals that she is terrified of childbirth and worried that she isn’t ready for the way her life is about to change. Piglet assures her that their friendship will not change.
As Piglet drives to the dress shop, her mother, Linda, asks if her elderly aunt Irene can stay at Piglet’s home the night of the wedding. Piglet doesn’t respond. At the dress shop, Piglet is unmoved at the sight of her dress, though Linda and Franny begin to cry. Piglet feels uncomfortable undressing in front of the shop owner, Allegra Joy, comparing their bodies negatively. As she struggles to button up the corset, Allegra Joy suggests that Piglet fasts for a few days for the wedding so that the dress fits properly.
When Linda notices that the corset isn’t fully buttoned, she insists that she can squeeze Piglet into it. Allegra Joy and Piglet both try to block her from touching the dress, and in the ensuing scuffle, Piglet falls, ripping the dress. At the same time, Margot’s water breaks. The women leave the dress at the shop and take Margot home to wait for her midwife. Piglet feels left out as Linda helps Margot breathe through her contractions. After Linda and Franny leave, Margot asks Piglet to distract her from the pain. Piglet reveals Kit’s betrayal, commenting vaguely that it lasted two or three years. Margot is shocked that Piglet still plans to marry Kit.
In the interstitial epigraph, Piglet wonders what she is doing and if anything will ever satisfy her again.
Part 1, Chapter 9 Summary: “6 Days”
Margot’s baby is born just before midnight on the day of the dress fitting. Sasha texts Piglet a photo of the baby and reminds her to take care of herself, suggesting that Margot told Sasha about Kit’s betrayal. Piglet regrets telling Margot. Before, she and Kit had been able to form an uneasy alliance based on her willingness to forgive him. Now, Kit feels betrayed by Piglet’s admission of his guilt.
Kit offers to make breakfast. Piglet notices that he has the heat on too high and that he is stirring porridge with a spatula reserved for cooking onions. She tries to eat, but the porridge is too thick and reminds her of vomit. When she criticizes the breakfast, Kit warns her not to be rude after he did something nice. She retorts that, after his betrayal, she can talk to him however he likes. Kit obliquely suggests that he is not forcing her to eat or to marry him, and Piglet throws the bowl of porridge onto the floor, shattering it.
Piglet leaves the house, despite knowing that they have plans to visit Kit’s parents. She walks through town and stops outside of a diner, watching a woman eat a full meal of chicken and waffles and a cinnamon bun. She looks at the menu but decides not to eat. By the time she reaches Kit’s parents’ house, he is already there. He ignores her, and she turns her full attention to his mother, who seems to sense that something is going on. The sight of Kit’s mother’s roast pork makes her sick, and she vomits in the bathroom. Kit rushes to comfort her.
In the interstitial epigraph, Piglet imagines crawling into the bag holding her wedding dress as if it were a body bag.
Part 1, Chapter 10 Summary: “4 Days”
Piglet burns a traybake that she is preparing for Margot while thinking about their relationship. She is surprised by Margot’s insistence that she deserves better than Kit and should not marry him. She had anticipated support and acceptance of her decision. She deletes a series of voice memos from Margot asking her to call and voicing frustration that Piglet hasn’t asked about her experience in childbirth. In the months before the baby was born, Piglet imagined her life as a surrogate aunt, supporting Margot and Sasha and caring for their baby. Now, she worries that Margot and Sasha are judging her decision to stay with Kit. Piglet also deletes all her recent texts from Franny, who continues to ask to borrow money.
Since she threw the bowl of porridge, Piglet and Kit have hardly spoken. She imagines their relationship as a fractured bone that has now fully split in two. She struggles to recall why Kit is mad at her when he is the one who betrayed their relationship.
The fire alarm goes off as Piglet removes the burnt traybake from the oven. She collapses onto the ground, unable to respond. Kit rushes in and begins waving a tea towel to disperse the smoke. He then sits on the ground next to her. Piglet realizes that she has isolated herself so much that Kit is all she has left. She rests her head on his shoulder, and he embraces her quickly before opening the patio door to let the remaining smoke out. He returns with a plate of bread and cheese and two glasses of wine. She eats the bread and confirms that she still wants to marry him.
In the interstitial epigraph, Piglet imagines herself propelled toward a disaster, knowing she has only herself to blame.
Part 1, Chapters 6-10 Analysis
This section of Piglet introduces the novel’s thematic interest in Body Image and the Pressure to Be Thin by featuring scenes in which Piglet watches women eat. These extended depictions of other women eating suggest that Piglet longs to indulge in her love for food but feels immense pressure to restrain herself. The morning after Kit reveals his betrayal, Piglet rides the London Underground aimlessly rather than going directly to work. She notices a woman “holding a baguette” and watches in fascination as “the train judder[s] forward [and] the woman s[inks] her teeth into the bread” (79, 89). The use of the phrase “s[inks] her teeth” suggests that the woman’s hunger is animalistic. As she watches, Piglet realizes that the sandwich is “a banh mi […] stuffed with sausage, coriander, shredded carrot, [and] pickled cucumber” and that “mayonnaise and sriracha ooze[] onto the woman’s fingers” (79). Here, the use of the words “stuffed” and “ooze[]” creates a sense of excess that is heightened as “a glob of sauce f[alls] from the sandwich to land on one of Grey Suit’s shiny, black shoes” (79). Despite this obvious violation of societal expectations, the woman continues eating unabashedly: “[T]he woman raised a finger, nodded an apology, but kept chewing, kept eating” (79). The stranger’s unapologetic enjoyment of her messy, fatty banh mi offers a stark contrast to Piglet’s carefully controlled relationship with food. As she watches the woman eat, Piglet fantasizes “about staying, about following her, about slipping into her life” (79), suggesting that she wishes she could enjoy food with equal abandon. Ultimately, however, Piglet leaves the train and returns to work in an attempt to regulate her own relationship with food.
This pattern repeats in Chapter 9 after Piglet breaks a bowl during an argument with Kit. As she wanders aimlessly through Oxford, she sees a woman eating alone in a diner. As in Chapter 6, Piglet fixates on this woman and watches her eat. When her food arrives, “waffles piled high with fried chicken, a tumbler filled with ice and slices of citrus, a cinnamon roll on the side,” Piglet notices that the woman’s “cheeks lift[] and glow[]” (137). The woman’s joy at her carb-packed, full-fat meal offers a stark contrast to the simple porridge that Piglet had for breakfast. Piglet’s fascination with watching the woman eat suggests that she also wants to indulge, but she once again denies herself the pleasure: When offered a menu, “she sh[akes] her head. She look[s] at her watch; she look[s] at her phone” (137), hoping for a text from Kit. This scene reflects Piglet’s struggles with body image and the pressure to be thin as her wedding approaches.
These chapters also highlight the theme of The Pressure to Build a Perfect Life as Piglet grapples with the reality that Kit has betrayed her and that her life is not as perfect as she once thought. She begins “to imagine how it would be to tell people, how it would be to not tell people” (107). These fantasies reflect Piglet’s isolation from everyone in her life who is not Kit. Her unwillingness to talk about Kit’s betrayal—and her inability to properly gauge how they might respond—suggests that she feels closer to Kit than to anyone else in her life. Piglet imagines that her family would be shocked but unsurprised by the news. She imagines that her sister Franny’s “eyes would widen—shock and relief. She would throw her arms around her. If it’s too good to be true, it probably is, she would say” (81). Piglet imagines a more judgmental response from her parents, whom she pictures nodding silently, “the tilt of their heads confirming that yes, this daughter didn’t know what she was doing after all, and she [i]s so, so far from home” (81). Although she has multiple opportunities to tell her family about Kit’s betrayal, she keeps it to herself, suggesting that she does not feel close enough to them to reveal how deeply Kit has hurt her.
Ultimately, the only person whom Piglet does tell at this point is her best friend, Margot. Before telling Margot, Piglet imagines that she and her wife, Sasha, will echo her anger but ultimately support her decision. She imagines “Margot swearing, indignant; Sasha shaking her head” (81). When she does ultimately tell Margot, she is “shocked by [her] indignance, by the fierceness with which her friend demand[s] her to want better for herself” (148). The repetition of the word “indignance” recalls the earlier passage, highlighting how deeply Piglet has misread Margot, which in turn illustrates Piglet’s low self-esteem. Margot’s insistence that she deserves better surprises her, indicating that she doesn’t believe the same.
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