Well, you've got to read the book to really get any sort of satisfactory answer, of course. I will say, and admittedly with bias, that I think Peggy is the type of character we don't often see in modern literature, which is not to say that she is all that unique, at least on the surface. She is a wife. She is a mother. She is a woman who had certain aspirations and is in the process of resuming those aspirations at the start of THE WOMAN IN THE SUN HAT. Yet things occur which send her resurfaced trajectory off the rails, and, through her attempts at survival, she comes to question her own character. The many existential queries start to follow suit; Who am I? What could I have changed to alter where I am now? Yet these questions do not sit in the air waiting to be answered, because Peggy has little time to dwell on them. Like many, she struggles with reinvention and survival, and finding a purpose to continue surviving through the many absurdities of life.