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Summary
Prologue
In the brief prologue, an unnamed narrator discusses her relationship to an attractive but dangerous man. Claiming that she had both loved and hated the man, the narrator describes him as a handsome daredevil, but notes that his charm slowly stopped working on her after a series of mistakes almost led to her death. Together, the pair had been rebels who fought against corruption and injustice in the medical system. Cryptically, she acknowledges that she herself was responsible for putting a chain of events into motion that led to violence and infamy.
Chapter 1
On Andrea “Andy” Oliver’s 31st birthday, she meets her mother, Laura, for lunch at a diner in a mall in their hometown of Belle Isle, Georgia, where Andy works in the police dispatch division answering 911 calls. Laura, who works as a speech pathologist, blames herself for Andy being stuck in Belle Isle. Three years earlier, Andy had been living in New York City to follow her dreams of working in the entertainment industry. There, Andy had been miserable, barely scraping by financially with part-time jobs, and making few friends. While she was living in New York, she received a phone call from Laura, who told her that she had been diagnosed with breast cancer. Shocked, Andy decided to move back to Georgia to care for her mother through her cancer treatment. Now, Laura is in good health, but Andy remains in Belle Isle, living in a room above Laura’s garage. In the diner, Andy confesses to Laura that she had never been happy in New York and had made little progress in her career goals before returning home. In response, Laura attempts to encourage Andy to pursue her dreams and get her life back on track.
Their conversation is interrupted by an older woman named Betsy Barnard, whose father was a patient of Laura. Betsy thanks Laura for the progress she made with her father and introduces her daughter, a teenage girl named Shelly, to Andy and Laura. Tired and bored, Andy stops paying attention to the conversation when suddenly, a gun goes off. Shelly falls to the ground, dead, and her mother, Betsy, is shot and killed shortly afterwards. One bullet grazes an unnamed bystander, and another hits a cup, sending glass shards through the air, one of which gets lodged into Laura’s leg.
Laura moves to shield a dazed Andy as the shooter, a young man dressed as a cowboy, enters the diner. Seeing Andy’s police uniform, he asks her where her gun is, trying to provoke her into a gunfight. However, Laura intervenes, insisting that he shoot her instead and instructing Andy to run to safety. The young man is unprepared for Laura’s reaction and pulls out a hunting knife. Laura raises her hand defensively as the young man swings the knife towards her, and the knife goes through the center of her palm. To the surprise of the young man, Laura then uses the knife embedded in her hand as a weapon, slamming it down onto the back of his neck. Injured, he attempts to lift his gun, but Laura swings the knife around his neck, slashing his throat and killing him instantly.
Chapter 2
Andy reflects upon a high school memory. She’d had a crush on a boy in her 9th grade class named Cletus Laraby, or “Cleet,” who played the guitar and was interested in chemistry. Hoping to impress him, Andy signed up for the school science fair. Together with her father, Gordon, Andy spends weeks working on a rocket to present at the fair. One week before the fair, she submits her notes and photographs to her science teacher as documentation of her work on the rocket when Cleet enters the classroom. In her brief conversation with him, Andy learns that Cleet, who is shallow and judgmental, already has a girlfriend. Horrified, Andy leaves the classroom without collecting her notes, then walks to her father’s house and attempts to burn the rocket, as well as two test rockets, in a trashcan using lighter fluid and a match. The rockets explode, knocking Andy unconscious, and when she awakes, she is lying on her back on the floor of Gordon’s driveway. She does not regain her hearing for four days, and in that time, she only hears a single sharp tone that she describes as an unending “eeeeee” sound.
In the present, Andy hears that same “eeeeee” sound in the diner after her mother kills the young man who murdered Shelly and Betsy. A crowd of people form around them, some taking pictures and videos. The knife is still stuck in Laura’s hand as she struggles to wrap a tablecloth around her bleeding leg. Laura calmly instructs a dazed Andy not to talk to the police and to pretend that she does not remember anything from the incident. Later, in a hospital, doctors attend to Laura’s injuries and Andy reflects upon the shocking turn of events. Several images stick in her mind, including a strange gesture by Laura, who held up four fingers on her left hand and one finger on her right hand to indicate to the shooter that he only had one bullet left in his gun. While waiting, she learns that the shooter was a young man named Jonah Helsinger. Gordon arrives at the hospital and comforts Andy as she cries. He reassures her that everything is alright and urges her to get some rest before discussing the shooting. As Gordon chats with a police officer, Andy realizes that her mother will likely be the focus of both media attention and a police investigation. Two detectives, Lisa Palazzolo and Brant Wilkes, attempt to question Andy but Gordon intervenes. At first, the detectives do not realize that he is her father, as he is Black, and Andy is white. Acting as both her father and her lawyer, Gordon forces the detectives to back off until Andy has had time to recover.
Detective Palazzolo attempts a different tactic, explaining the situation to Andy and Gordon. The shooter, she notes, was a high school senior from a locally prominent family. He had planned for several weeks to murder Shelly, his ex-girlfriend who had recently broken up with him, and Betsy, whom he blamed for the breakup. After leaving a pipe bomb in his bedroom, he went to the mall to carry out the murders, planning to shoot one other random bystander and then die in a shootout with the police. Jonah approached Andy in the diner, Detective Palazzolo explains, on the false assumption that she was a police officer. Detective Palazzolo asks Gordon and Andy if Laura has ever received military or self-defense training, and when they do not answer, she shows them a video of the incident, which was taken by a bystander on a cellphone. In the video, Jonah enters the diner and murders Shelly and Betsy as Laura moves deliberately towards both the shooter and Andy. Laura’s face is calm as she requests that he use his last bullet on her, and Andy realizes while watching the video that Laura had been able to count the number of bullets Jonah shot while others in the diner attempted to flee.
Detective Palazzolo attempts to take advantage of Gordon’s shock to resume her questioning of Andy when Laura exits the operating room in a wheelchair and insists upon returning home immediately. She coldly dismisses Detective Palazzolo, refusing to answer any questions and insisting that they can arrange a meeting later. As Gordon goes to retrieve his car, Laura asks Andy if she said anything to the police and then coldly demands that Andy move out of her house that very night. Andy, who is still shocked by the video, goes to the restroom to vomit. While in the stall, Detective Palazzolo again attempts to question Andy, and failing to do so, she leaves her business card on the sink.
Analysis: Prologue and Chapters 1 & 2
In these early chapters, the novel’s protagonist, Andy, is a young woman with an ordinary life, who faces a series of ordinary challenges. Years earlier, she had been an ambitious young woman who moved to New York City to pursue her dreams of working in the entertainment industry. After several crushing years marked by professional and romantic disappointments, she lost her drive and focus. However, she conceals these personal failures from her parents and pretends that things are going well because she is too embarrassed to admit that her time in New York has not brought her any closer to her goals. At this point in the novel, Andy’s relationship to her parents, and especially her mother, Laura, is marked by miscommunication. Like many other young people, she is too afraid of disappointing her parents to be honest with them or to ask for help. When Laura calls Andy and informs her that she has been diagnosed with breast cancer, however, Andy does not hesitate to return home to care for her, testifying to the love she has for her mother despite her difficulty in communicating openly with her. Though Andy does not admit this to her parents, she is also relieved to have an excuse to return home from New York, a city that is tainted for her by negative experiences and unfulfilled goals.
Read an in-depth character analysis of Andrea “Andy” Oliver.
Back home in Georgia, however, Andy quickly finds herself stuck in a rut. After Laura’s recovery, Andy remains in the room above Laura’s garage, working an unfulfilling job with little prospect of advancement. Andy and Laura’s conversation in the diner underlines the tensions in their otherwise loving relationship. Laura thinks of her daughter as a bright and promising young woman, and she cannot understand why Andy has continued to remain in Belle Isle. Andy’s father, Gordon, is even more forceful in his attempt to push Andy to change her stagnant lifestyle, suggesting to Laura that she should kick Andy out of the house. Andy, however, has a more pessimistic understanding of her future prospects, and feels that it is already too late for her to begin a new life. The misunderstandings that mark Andy’s relationship to her parents are intensified by the fact that her parents are so successful in their own lines of work: Laura is a well-respected speech therapist, and Gordon is a prominent lawyer. Andy’s failure to meet her parents’ high expectations reflects the novel’s exploration of generational divides. Her parents believe that anything can be accomplished with the right attitude and some hard work, but Andy feels stung by her failure to “make it” in New York and struggles to regain her independence.
Read an in-depth character analysis of Laura Oliver/Jane Queller.
After the shocking and violent incident at the diner, Andy’s ordinary, everyday problems quickly fade away in the face of new challenges that she feels unprepared to handle. Her boring but familiar daily life is quickly disrupted, not only by her near-death experience at the hands of a spree-killer, but also by her mother’s actions. When Jonah enters the diner and begins to shoot at the customers, Andy responds by freezing up, a characteristic response for her. Laura, however, springs into action like a trained soldier, violently but efficiently killing Jonah despite a serious injury to her leg. This stark contrast in their reactions is one of many instances in the novel in which action is contrasted against inaction. In later chapters, indecisive and hesitant Andy will have to learn to make quick decisions and act swiftly in order to survive.
Read about the motif of Shocking Acts of Violence as a motif in Pieces of Her.
