Book Review: Pieces of Her

Spoilers (for the book and TV show)!

The central question at the heart of Karin Slaughter’s 2018 book, Pieces of Her, and which Slaughter even prefaces the book with, is how well do we know the people we love, or do we only get the pieces of them they choose to share? Similarly, apparently, I didn’t know the 2022 Netflix show I watched, Pieces of Her, was an adaptation of Slaughter’s book. I only saw it had Toni Collette, who is among my favorite actors, and so I watched, and then was glued to the screen. As such, it took me a few pages into Pieces of Her before I put the pieces together. Despite doing the rare adaptation first, book second, I was still glued to the pages. Slaughter is so darn good at ratcheting up the tension and suspense, while also sprinkling in pieces of connective tissue and wisdom.

Pieces of Her opens with one of the most heart-pounding scenes in a popular fiction book I’ve read: Laura, a breast cancer survivor, is having dinner with Andy, her 31-year-old listless daughter. Andy is a 9-1-1 dispatcher, so, she has on a uniform that vaguely resembles a police officer’s. Laura’s job is as a speech pathologist, and one of her clients and the client’s daughter approach Laura to thank her. That’s when inexplicably, the deranged ex-boyfriend of the daughter shoots them both. He then intends suicide-by-cop, thinking Andy a cop rather than a dispatcher. Laura stops him by taking a knife through her hand, and then using that same knife in her hand to cut the man’s throat.

From this incident unspools the secrets of Laura’s life, forcing Andy on the run to learn those secrets, and interspersed with Laura’s former life as Jane in 1986 as part of the cult, the Army for the Changing of the World, led by Nick, her lover and Andy’s real father. Nick, as one FBI agent later tells Jane, is in it to bed the girls and make the boys think him a God, and he’s perfected yo-yoing Jane and the rest of the cult, including her brother, Andrew, along. In fact, the big starting off point is convincing another woman to kill Jane and Andrew’s billionaire father for medical fraud and callous greed at a panel in Oslo. Eventually, Jane, pregnant with Andi, would come to her senses after perhaps the third beating and suffocation from Nick (along with him causing previous miscarriages), to leave him, and get her brother, who was dying of AIDS, help. She then turned on the cult and went into witness protection.

The incident at the diner became front page news, which put Laura/Jane back on the radar of Nick and his eager lapdog, Paula, who was part of the cult and never really left. This, despite her protestations about the patriarchy. Nick through Paula sends a goon to finish Laura off, but not before finding out where the papers that implicate Laura and Andrew’s oldest brother and owner of the Queller Corporation their father previously stewarded, Jasper, in similar medical fraud and callous greed.

Nick, Paula, and Jasper — in that order — were such awful, terrible characters, who I was waiting for the good guys (Andy and Laura/Jane mostly) to give them their comeuppance. Slaughter’s superpower is writing despicable human beings who you find easy to loathe: Nick with his gaslighting cult; Paula with her brutishness toward Jane, stemming from jealousy over her relationship with Nick; and Jasper for being willing to let his brother, Andrew, die with all the blame for killing their father because he was a “fag.” These were awful humans.

But just as awful as they were, Andy and Laura/Jane were good, if the latter far more complicated and with blurred lines along the way. After all, Jane was part of the cult and did participate in awful events, including orchestrating the death of her own father. Her own father, mind you, who physically and sexually abused her. (If I recall correctly, the latter was hinted at in the TV series, but I don’t remember it being explicit, whereas it was explicitly stated in the book.) Still, she ended up doing the right thing and living a good life. Andy at 31 and on the lam is timid and unsure of herself. She cries a lot and can barely get a word out when confronting Paula. Jane at an even younger age as part of the cult is timid and unsure of herself and cries a lot, obviously, which is why Nick is able to control her so easily. But then they both are able to find their resolve and resilience along the way that makes them three-dimensional characters we root for as readers. That parallels between mother and daughter were fun and well-done, along with realizing that Andy is named after Jane’s brother, who she loved dearly.

Four other differences that come to mind with the adaptation, if I’m remembering the TV series correctly:

1. Jane herself quit doing classical piano in the TV series by harming her hand; in the book, it’s Nick who forces her to quit because part of his cult gaslighting was always giving her ultimatums that led her back to him, narrowing her world.
2. A man was present in Andy’s life since she was a kid and he turns out to be Jane’s handler in witness protection, and Jane eventually quits witness protection, much to his chagrin in the TV series; and in the book, that wasn’t the case and that character didn’t even exist, and it’s witness protection that helps Laura masterfully trick Nick into implicating himself in the conspiracy with Paula.
3. Jasper played a bigger role in the TV series, being one of the people coming after Jane; in the book, it was only Nick (through Paula), because it was reasoned Jasper didn’t care anymore because the statue of limitations on the fraud had run its course and it wouldn’t have sunken his presidential aspirations anyhow.
4. Andrew died of a gunshot in the TV series; in the book, he died of AIDS.

On the whole, the adaptation was a mostly faithful one, albeit, shockingly, I like the first two changes to the book’s plot I mentioned above. I liked Jane making a choice to rebel, albeit harshly by harming her own hands, against her father, and I liked the story of the U.S. Marshal being in Jane/Laura’s life from the beginning and seeing Andy grow up. I’m torn on the third one. Part of me likes keeping it narrowed to Nick and Jane instead of bringing Jasper back into it, but part of me also think it’s weird that Jasper just moved on, as it were. As for the fourth, I loved the subplot of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s: how Jane volunteered in a hospital ward comforting those afflicted with AIDS, even when the nurses themselves seemed scared, how Andrew’s addictions and attraction to Nick (physically and otherwise) make more sense, and how callous Nick and Jasper were about Andrew’s illness. The series definitely missed out on showing that because dichotomous to Nick and Jasper’s callousness, it showed Jane’s love and care for her brother.

Overall, I would recommend both the TV series and the book, but as always, if you’re looking for more detail and better context for the arc of the characters, you should turn to the book and you turn to Slaughter’s deft handling therein. She’s so good. Pieces of Her, somehow despite knowing the main plot points because of the TV series, is still one of my favorite reads of the year. That’s how good Slaughter is with her storytelling and writing.