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Summary
Chapter 6
After a time-wasting detour through Atlanta, Andy buys a paper map at a gas station and makes her way towards Laura’ storage unit in Carrollton, though she isn’t sure exactly where it is. Feeling lost but unwilling to use her cellphone and risk exposing her location, she finds a public library and uses a computer to locate the Get-Em-Go storage facility, which is in walking distance of the library. Recalling that Laura recommended that Andy travel to Idaho after retrieving the car from the storage unit, Andy searches online for a route there. Next, she looks up local news to see if the death of Hoodie, whose actual name was Samuel Godfrey Beckett, has been reported, and she is surprised to find that there has been no mention of him in the news. Andy then recalls that, in the brief bit of conversation she heard between Hoodie and Laura, they discussed the whereabouts of a woman named Paula Kunde. Using the library computer, she finds that Paula Kunde works in the Women’s Studies department at the University of Texas-Austin.
She exits the library and sees an unknown man peering through the windows of Hoodie’s car. Startled, Andy worries that the man is looking for her, and she sneaks around the library and walks towards the storage facility. At the Get-Em-Go, she uses the key given to her by Laura to access the storage unit, where she finds an unused Reliant station wagon. Inside the wagon, Andy finds a carry-on suitcase full of women’s clothing, around $240,000 in cash, and a bag containing Polaroid photos. Many of the photos feature a much younger Laura in the 1980s showing clear signs that she has been brutally attacked. Next, Andy finds photos of herself as a toddler in the snow, in a location that must be far from warm Georgia. Last, she finds evidence that Laura fabricated much of what Andy knows about her own background, including the identity of her father and paternal grandparents. Andy struggles to make sense of her discoveries.
Chapter 7
Here, the story transitions to events that occurred in the summer of 1986. At an economics conference in Oslo, Norway, a woman named Laura Juneau is escorted through tight security towards a check-in desk. There, she lies to a receptionist, pretending to be Dr. Alexandra Maplecroft of Berkeley College. When the woman begins to scrutinize Laura’s fake credentials, they are interrupted by two handsome, well-dressed young men: the charming Nicholas Harp and the flustered Andrew Queller, whose father, Martin Queller, is scheduled to speak on the same panel as Maplecroft. Laura knows the two young men and is nervous that Nick is behaving in ways that deviate from their carefully devised plan. As she considers Nick and Andrew, she thinks of her own son, David, who was murdered in the past. To ease her nerves, Laura goes to the convention center bar, where she orders a drink, listens to someone play “Take on Me” by Swedish band A-ha on the piano, and reflects mournfully on her own daughter, Lila, who loved pop music. She is joined by the young woman playing piano, Jane Queller, sister of Andrew and daughter of Martin. They discuss the upcoming panel, Jane’s father, Maplecroft’s scholarship, and music. Laura admits that she has seen Jane, a famed concert pianist who has recently retired despite her youth, play piano before. Jane says that she gave up concert performance due to the “glass ceiling” for female performers, but that she enjoys her current work playing jazz piano in a recording studio in Berlin.
They separate as Laura goes to the bathroom, where she looks for and finds a brown paper bag hidden behind a toilet, and then makes her way to the conference room where the panel will be held. There, she meets the other three panelists, including Martin Queller, who makes rude remarks to her due to her gender and race. As she nervously prepares to debate Queller, she reflects upon the deaths of her family members and her own painful injuries. In front of the audience, Laura, still under the guise of Dr. Alexandra Maplecroft, accuses Queller of advocating for the privatization of mental healthcare while simultaneously profiting from his recommended policies by operating Queller Healthcare facilities that have been contracted by the government. Queller dismisses her as an idealistic socialist and Laura, in turn, highlights the inadequacies of the “Queller model” of private health care, which Queller hopes to expand across the entire nation. In particular, she mentions a former patient named Robert David Juneau, an engineer who was injured in a workplace accident that altered his personality. After being kicked out of six different mental care facilities operated by Queller, he returned home, murdered his children, shot and injured his wife, and then committed suicide. As Queller begins to realize that Laura is not truly Dr. Maplecroft, she acknowledges that she is the widow of Juneau. The original plan, orchestrated by Jane, Nick, and Andrew, was for Laura to find red-dye packs in a paper bag in the restroom and throw them at Queller to symbolize the blood that his policies have spilled. When Laura reaches into the bag, however, she finds a gun. After making eye contact with Jane in the audience, Laura shoots Queller, killing him, and then commits suicide in front of the shocked panel audience.
Chapter 8
In the present, Andy follows her mother’s directions, taking the Reliant truck from the storage unit and driving towards Idaho. As she drives, she realizes that she forgot to cut the batteries of Hoodie’s car as Laura instructed her to, and she worries that the car might be traceable by GPS. Confused by the growing mystery surrounding her mother’s identity and exhausted after a sleepless night driving away from Belle Isle, Andy pulls over at a motel, though she worries about leaving the $240,000 of cash in the Reliant and brings some of it with her in a jewelry bag. After checking out a room, she walks to the diner next door and falls asleep before ordering anything. When she wakes up, she is relieved to find that the money has not been taken, and that the motel receptionist has prepared some food for her. Returning to her room, she eats her dinner, showers, and hides the money, splitting it into smaller amounts for safety. On the news, she sees that the video from the diner is still a topic of discussion, but the death of Hoodie has still not been reported.
She walks to the bar across from the motel and orders a drink before recognizing another patron: the man she had nicknamed “Alabama” at the hospital in Belle Isle. Introducing himself as Michael or “Mike” Benjamin Knepper, he accuses a shocked Andy of following him, and she returns the accusation. He tells Andy that he lives near the motel but went down to Georgia to visit his dying grandmother in the hospital. There, he claims, he had been interested in speaking to Andy because his own father had once murdered a home-intruder, and he thought they might relate to each other given their similar circumstances. Though Andy cannot account for the coincidence of his being at the same bar in rural Alabama, she finds him charming and handsome and responds to his flirtations. Discussing the video from the diner in Belle Isle, Mike points out that Laura’s posture was defensive rather than offensive, suggesting that Laura had not intended to murder Helsinger. When he steps out of the bar, she uses his phone to look up the news, and she discovers that Hoodie’s body has been found in a body of water, but his identity is still unknown to the police, who do not suspect foul play. When Mike returns to the bar, he escorts Andy out and they kiss in the parking lot. There, she attempts to fondle him, but discovers to her embarrassment that she has been rubbing a rabbit foot keychain in his pocket rather than his genitals. Mike declines to pursue things further and drives away from the bar, leaving Andy feeling ashamed by her reckless and awkward behavior. When she returns to her motel room, she realizes that she saw a similar rabbit foot keychain in a car near Laura’s house on the night of Hoodie’s death.
Analysis: Chapters 6-8
In the early chapters of the novel, Andy struggles to make decisions for herself and to show initiative. After leaving Laura’s home in the dead of night, her newfound independence proves a difficult challenge, and she fights her own instinct to call her mother and father and ask them for help. Fleeing from both the police and the mysterious group who sent Hoodie to torture Laura, Andy is forced to mature quickly under extremely difficult circumstances, learning to take advantage of public resources such as libraries to obtain necessary information, and to cover her own tracks. Still, the many small errors she makes, including her failure to cut the batteries of Hoodie’s car, forgetting to use incognito mode on the library computer, and providing a contradictory story to the motel receptionist, all show that she still has a good deal to learn at this point in the novel. Her occasional ineptitude offers a strong contrast Laura, whose storage unit evidences her caution, foresight, and careful planning. After Andy enters the storage unit, the mystery surrounding Laura deepens, cementing Andy’s belief that she has never truly known her mother in all her complexity, an important theme in the novel. Further, this sense of mystery begins to surround Andy’s own background as she learns that Laura has fabricated the identities of her father and grandparents. In the span of a single day, Andy has not only lost her sense of security, but also her sense of identity. Andy’s journey, then, is not only a quest for survival, but also to better understand her mother, and ultimately, herself.
This section of the book also introduces the first of several chapter-length flashbacks to events in the 1980s. The events described in Oslo in Chapter 7 are shocking, though it is not at first clear how they relate to Andy and Laura’s narrative in the present day. Suggestively, the primary figure of Chapter 7 is named “Laura,” though various biographical details, including her age and race, suggest that she is not the same “Laura” whom Andy knows as her mother. Chapter 7 only further deepens the mystery at the core of the novel.
Laura Juneau’s story also introduces several political themes that will become central to Pieces of Her. White, wealthy, and male, QuellCorp CEO Martin Queller serves as an emblem of privilege in the novel. He arrogantly dismisses Laura Juneau, who is Black, on the basis of both her gender and race, factors which he believes have clouded her judgment and prevented her from thinking objectively. She stuns him, however, with a moving and well-informed speech that highlights both Martin’s personal financial investment in his economic theories, as well as the inadequacies of the healthcare offered under the “Queller Model.” While Queller only cares about numbers, Laura Juneau speaks to the human impact of economic policies which place no value in the lives of the poor, ill, or disabled. Here, the novel connects its fictional narrative to real historical events, including the privatization of healthcare under the administration of President Ronald Reagan, arguing that these policies were designed to enrich the powerful at the cost of the working class. Though Pieces of Her takes a clear political stand on these topics, the assassination of Martin Queller and the unresolved question of who placed the gun in the paper bag call into question the use of violent tactics by activists. Later chapters in the novel will continue to explore the relationship between justice, violence, and extremism.
Read more about the Dangers of Extremism as a theme of Pieces of Her.
