Pieces of Her

Andy Oliver, or Andrea, is the daughter of Laura Oliver/Jane Queller and Nick Harp/Clayton Morrow. When Pieces of Her begins, she is 31 years old and living in the apartment above her mother’s garage. Andy was a theater major at Savannah College of Art & Design, but did not finish her degree. Three years before the novel’s start, she had been living in New York, trying to break into the theater business, when Laura was diagnosed with breast cancer. Andy left New York and moved back home to take care of her mother, getting a job as a night shift police dispatcher at the local department.

At the beginning of the novel, Andy is depressed and self-deprecating: “I’m thirty-one years old, I haven’t gone on a real date in three years, I have sixty-three thousand dollars in student debt for a degree I never finished” (11). Physically, she describes herself as follows: “Dirty brown hair thrown into a careless ponytail. Dark circles under her tired eyes. Nails bitten down to the quick. The bones of her wrists like the promontory of a ship. Her skin, normally pale, had taken on the pallor of hot dog water” (5). However, other characters often comment that Andy looks like her mother, whom she sees as beautiful; she is even able to use her mother’s identification because they look so much alike.