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Imagine it’s your 30th birthday and your mother—a pleasant, boring speech pathologist and cancer survivor—is treating you to brunch in the seaside Southern town where you enjoyed a pleasant, boring upbringing. Then an armed shooter bursts into the restaurant, and your mother slashes his throat in cold blood.
In the new Netflix series Pieces of Her, this is the incident that sends stalled artist Andrea “Andy” Oliver (Bella Heathcote) into a spiral that pushes her to question everything she thought she knew about her mother Laura (Toni Collette). As if that’s not enough, Andy then thwarts another attack on her mother later that same night. The next thing she knows, Laura’s shoved a makeup bag full of cash into her hands and given her the address of a storage unit in Texas, and all of a sudden Andy is running for her life.
Pieces of Her is adapted from a standalone novel of the same name by bestselling author Karin Slaughter, who is best known for her linked Grant County and Will Trent series. In both the book and the Netflix show, Pieces of Her follows Andy’s journey to uncover the truth Laura has long kept hidden from her, all while outrunning whoever the hell is after both of them. This present-day storyline is interspersed with a separate one that takes place 25 years in the past. This plot follows Jane Queller (Jessica Barden), a young woman whose father is publicly murdered by a radical group known as the Army of the Changing World—a group with which Jane herself is intimately involved.
Over the course of the series’ eight heart-pounding episodes, Heathcote, Collette, and Barden deliver a powerhouse trio of performances as the story’s central characters. But how does the show stack up against Slaughter’s novel? For one thing, the plot is considerably more complex; perhaps that’s to beef up a full season’s worth of television. Where the standalone book wraps up all major storylines nicely by the end, certain cliffhangers in the series finale lead me to believe that perhaps the changes were made to allow for additional seasons (if the show is renewed). But the change in medium doesn’t explain away all the differences between the book and the screen adaptation: While watching, I spotted numerous small changes that made a pretty big difference in the story’s impact without significantly altering the plot. Read on for a list of the most noticeable differences between the Netflix series and the novel that inspired it.
Warning! Some spoilers follow.
Witness Protection
In the book, Andy is both attracted to and scared of a man named Mike who seems to be following her across the U.S. We later learn that Laura is in witness protection—which means Andy has been, too, for her entire life—and Mike is the U.S. Marshal assigned to their case. In her previous life, Laura was Jane Queller, the daughter of the extremely wealthy family behind the QuellCorp healthcare empire, and the flashbacks we’ve been reading throughout the book are a chronicle of the events that led to Jane becoming Laura. In the series, meanwhile, there are two Marshals: Laura’s handler Charlie, whom Andy has known her entire life as a family friend, and Mike, a junior Marshal dispatched specifically to keep tabs on Andy. (And, yes, Andy and Mike still hit it off.)
The Bad Guys
In both the book and the series, Andy spends a significant amount of time on the run, but from whom? The answer depends on the version. In the book’s present-day storyline, Army of the Changing World leader Nick Harp—Jane’s former lover and Andy’s biological father—is still serving time for his crimes; Nick’s accomplice Paula Kunde, who is hopelessly in love with him, is out of prison after completing a 20-year sentence; and Jane’s eldest brother Jasper Queller, a billionaire who’s been focused on his floundering political aspirations ever since selling off the family company years ago, isn’t even a background character. Rather than lead her to Jasper, Andy’s search for answers instead takes her to Paula’s doorstep, only for her to eventually learn that Paula and Nick are the reason she and Laura are in danger.
In the series, quite a few things are different: For one, Nick never made it to prison—he’s been a fugitive of justice for the last 30 years, and quite a bit of the show’s storyline revolves around his apprehension and arrest. By contrast, Paula is still serving time and has very little to do with present-day events. While she seemingly remains loyal to Nick, there’s no undercurrent of unrequited love. Perhaps the most significant difference, however, has to do with Jasper’s role: he’s still the CEO of QuellCorp, as well as a major-party vice presidential candidate, and Andy immediately arranges to meet him when she discovers he’s her uncle. The reunion ends abruptly, however, when Andy realizes that Jasper’s goons are the people who nearly killed her and Mike while they were on the road.
Laura’s Involvement
In the book, Laura does her best to keep a low profile, and she doesn’t reconnect with Andy until the climactic end of the story. In the series, however, Laura plays an active role in tracking down the person who’s after her. She tries to keep Andy out of danger, repeatedly making contact with her daughter and trying to dictate her actions—not that Andy listens, of course. Laura even signs out of witness protection halfway through the series—something she never even considers doing in the book. A few episodes after that, mother and daughter finally meet up at a diner, only for circumstances to drive them apart yet again as Laura attempts to take matters into her own hands.
Jane’s Abuse
In the book, Jane Queller is a survivor of significant abuse at the hands of both her father Martin and her boyfriend Nick: Martin molested and beat her; Nick forced her to obtain an abortion and nearly killed her on more than one occasion. In the series, Martin is controlling and attempts to terminate Jane’s pregnancy against her will, but he never molests her, and a pivotal scene where Nick severely beats Jane is the audience’s first and only indication that he is physically abusive to her.
Jane’s brother Andrew. In both the book and the series, we learn through flashbacks that Jane and her older brother, middle child Andrew, are thick as thieves: She even names her daughter Andy after him. However, the circumstances of their relationship—and Andrew’s eventual death—differ significantly between the two versions of the story. In the book, Andrew was a serious junkie for just about Jane’s entire life, swearing off heroin only after meeting Nick and dedicating himself to Nick’s socialist cause. When Jane later realizes Andrew is dying of AIDS, she assumes he contracted it during his years of drug use; she doesn’t realize Andrew is also a closeted gay man until Jasper breaks the news to her after his death. In the show, Andrew doesn’t have much of a drug problem to speak of, and Jane is well aware of his sexuality; in fact, Nick used to be romantically entangled with Andrew before he met Jane. When Andrew dies, it’s a direct result of his involvement with Nick’s work: as the Army of the Changing World scrambles to flee a police raid on their safehouse, Andrew incurs a gunshot wound that goes untreated and eventually causes sepsis.
Andy’s Father
This is perhaps the least significant difference from a plot perspective, but it was the one I found most disappointing. In both versions of the story, Laura and Andy are white, where Laura’s ex-husband Gordon, who raised Andy with her, is Black. In the novel, however, Gordon has adopted Andy, and Slaughter makes it very clear that Andy and Laura both consider Gordon to be Andy’s father. While discovering the true identity of her biological father does have an impact on Andy, at no point does she engage in any sort of psychodrama about “where she comes from.” In the series, Gordon is Andy’s stepfather, and Laura also makes it very clear to him that she sees Andy as her daughter alone. There’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment in the final episode when Andy calls Gordon “Dad,” but given the lack of fanfare, this comes across as a slip-off more than as a satisfying resolution to Andy’s concerns about her parentage.
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