Little Pieces of Me, page 32
I promised myself the acknowledgments would be shorter this time around, but I have so many amazing writer friends I have to thank, including Lyn Liao Butler, Christine Adler, Mary Hawley, Leah DeCesare, Peggy Finck, Kerry Ann King, Kathryn Craft, Robin Taylor, Denny Bryce, Michele Montgomery, Barbara Conrey, Kelly Duran, Megan Collins, and Therese Walsh. Also Donald Maass and my group from the 2017 WFWA workshop.
Thank you to Jennie Nash for inventing the Inside Outline, and for making me realize I had written a mother-daughter story without realizing it for the second time. And to Grant Faulkner for starting National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). My Novembers will never be the same, and I’m grateful!
Thanks to Rich Plum for your friendship and your generous donation to Rock By The Sea to have your name in the book. I hope you like the scene you landed in!
Thank you to Kristin Zuccarini, Kevin Grady, Jennifer Ludwig, and Colleen McTaggert for your friendship and your killer design eyes. And to my FCB family and CB team for the support and for being a big part of the reason I want to keep my day job! Also, thank you to Megan Colleen McGlynn for starting Girlsday and letting me fictionalize one of their happy hours.
To John Corry and the former Same Bar Saturday crew at Four Farthings, and to Tom Piazza for hosting the party where I had the conversation that sparked the idea for this book.
I’ll always be grateful for my friend the talented photographer Will Byington for making me look better than real life, and to Angela Carlson for the fine-tuning. To the Puffcorn Mafia, My Girls, Meg McKeen, Krissie Callahan, #LibbyLove, DJ Johnson, Michelle Dash, Shana Freedman, Marija McPherson, Robbie Manning, Christina Williams, Jenna Leopold, Teddy Brown, and Emalie Weiland, thank you for your friendship and support. And thank you to Nate Godfrey for not throwing your wife’s phone out the window!
Thank you to my extended family, all of the Hammers, Bergers, Lewins, Kirbys, Murrays, Blocks, Nancy Multin, and Carlene Jarrett. And I can’t forget the Rock Boat and the Rock By The Sea family.
For all the behind-the-scenes work, thank you to the entire team at HarperCollins, including Elle Keck, Christina Joell, Kaitie Leary, Jeanie Lee, Diahann Sturge, Allison Draper, Pamela Barricklow, Mark O’Brien, Robin Barletta, Jennifer Hart, and Kelly Rudolph. And to Kristin Nelson, Brian Nelson, Tallahj Curry, Samantha Cronin, Maria Heater, Angie Hodapp of the Nelson Literary Agency, and Alice Lawson at Gersh. And thanks to Ann-Marie Nieves of Get Red PR and M.J. Rose of AuthorBuzz.
There are a few people I owe delayed thanks to for You and Me and Us (you’d be surprised how early we have to turn in these acknowledgments!). Thank you to Jason Ryan for recording my audio extras, Nalana Lillie for the candles, and to everyone who was supposed to be in conversation with me at one of my events that never came to be: Emily Belden, Erin Bartels, Lori Rader Day, Bob Bergen, and Colleen Oakley. Maybe one day we’ll get to have a do-over.
Thank you to Stephen Kellogg for turning lemons into lemonade and making my pandemic-launch something I’ll never forget. I’m grateful for your friendship and inspired by your music. Can’t wait to bring some of our ideas to life!
As writers, we write the words, but it’s the booksellers, book reviewers, and bookstagrammers who help put them in the hands of readers. Thank you to Rebecca and Kimberly George, Javier Ramirez and Mary Mollman, Mary Webber O’Malley, Pamela Klinger-Horn, Maxwell Gregory, Ashley Hasty, Ashley Spivey, Andrea Katz of Great Thoughts Great Readers, Kristy Barrett of A Novel Bee, Susan Peterson of Sue’s Reading Neighborhood, Annie McDonnell of the Write Review, Pamela Skjolsvik of the Quarantine Book Club, the Book Club Girls, the Girly Book Club, Friends and Fiction, A Mighty Blaze, the Book Sharks, Reader’s Coffeehouse, Tall Poppy Writers, the Bookish Ladies Club, and so many more.
Thank you to all of the book clubs who have read my books and invited me virtually into your homes for such interesting conversations. I’m so grateful.
And last, but certainly not least, thank YOU for reading this book and helping to make a lifelong dream come true. I’d love to hear from you at www.alisonhammer.com, on Facebook at www.facebook.com/ThisHammer, and @ThisHammer on Twitter and Instagram.
P.S. Insights, Interviews & More . . .*
About the Author
* * *
Meet Alison Hammer
About the Book
* * *
Behind the Book
Reading Group Guide
About the Author
Meet Alison Hammer
ALISON HAMMER is the author of You and Me and Us and the founder of the Every Damn Day Writers Facebook group. A graduate of the University of Florida and the Creative Circus in Atlanta, she now lives in Chicago, where she works as a VP creative director at an advertising agency.
Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.
About the Book
Behind the Book
It was late March 2017. A bunch of friends and I were meeting at Wrightwood Tap for one last hurrah before the neighborhood bar our friend owned closed the next day. The narrow room was already crowded by the time I got there, and I spotted my friend Mia sitting at the bar.
I said hello, and she said: “You’ll never believe what I just found out through Ancestry.com.”
Mia works in politics and is active in the Democratic community, so I said the first thing that came to mind. I asked if she’d found out that she was related to Trump.
“Worse,” she said.
After I threw out a few other names from history she wouldn’t like to be related to (Hitler and Mussolini, to name a few), she gave up on my ability to guess. That’s when she told me she had recently gotten an email from Ancestry.com telling her she had a new parent-child connection with a man who was not her beloved late father.
She was right. I never would have guessed that.
After she told me more about her discovery, I said what any writer would’ve said after hearing such a goose bumps–worthy tale. I said, “That would make an incredible book.”
At that point, I had recently finished writing the second draft of what would become my debut novel, You and Me and Us. I was still a year away from signing with my amazing agent, Joanna, but I was already on the lookout for an idea for my next book.
A few weeks after that night at the bar, I was still thinking about what Mia had told me. So when she reached out to say she wouldn’t mind if I wanted to write about her crazy DNA story, I wrote back right away.
I was definitely intrigued, but I didn’t want to write her story. I wanted to write a fictional story inspired by what had happened to Mia, and what, I was starting to realize, had likely happened to many other people, with the rise in popularity of these vanity DNA tests.
There were a few reasons I didn’t want to write her specific story. Mainly, I didn’t want to feel creatively limited or bound to her reality. When writing a story, you have to live inside your characters’ heads to access their thoughts and feelings. I couldn’t do that fully if I was trying to write about a real person. Real people, since her parents were obviously involved, too.
I did decide to give Paige, my main character, red hair like Mia, and also her drink of choice (vodka soda with just a splash of cranberry!). But other than that, Paige Meyer is her own, albeit fictional, person, and the specifics of her story and the way it all unfolded came entirely from my imagination.
Early that August, Mia and I met for lunch at Dublin’s, one of her go-to spots, and also the location of the first chapter in the book. Over lunch (scallops for me, salad for her) she told me her story. How she felt when she got the email from Ancestry.com, what her initial response was, how she first reached out to her mom, and then two of her best friends—Vasyl and Adrienne, who helped her make sense of the news.
Mia also shared a few articles she’d found in her personal research, as well as the transcript from her chat conversation with the online customer service at Ancestry.com. Most of that exchange made it into the book—but I had to make a few tweaks because early readers flagged some of the back-and-forth as unbelievable. They do say that truth is stranger than fiction!
Over the next month, the story started to take shape. I decided to give Paige two friends to ground her during her journey, and to help remind her who she really is. Like Paige, her friends Maks and Margaux are fictional—but they each share a bit in common with their real-life inspirations.
I used the French spelling of Margaux’s name as a nod to Adrienne, who found out through a DNA test that only half of her family history was accurate. The European part of her DNA she always thought was French had turned out to be Irish. Another thing the two women have in common is their impeccable style!
Vasyl and Maks are both from Ukraine—but Vasyl doesn’t share Maks’s challenges with the English language. That part is pure fiction. But they both can deliver one hell of a punch line, and they both drink “the cheapest whiskey with the most expensive ginger ale.”
I used September and October to do a little more work on the characters—rounding out their backstories and personality traits and doing a rough outline of how I thought the story would unfold. Then I was officially ready for my second attempt at National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), an international program where writers around the world are challenged to write fifty thousand words in the month of November.
At the stroke of midnight on Halloween night, as soon as it became November, I started writing the first draft of the book, which I was calling “Blank Paige” at the time. (Like Paige and her dad, I have a love of puns!)
When I first wrote the story, it was told in three parts. Part one took place in 2018, when Paige first made the DNA discovery. Part two took place back in 1974, at the University of Kansas, where Paige’s mom, dad, and DNA Dad all went to school. Part three picked up in the present day, after we found out exactly what happened that night in 1974, and showed Paige trying to make sense of it all.
The book was good. But it wasn’t great until my agent gave me the most amazing editorial suggestion. In the second part of the book, the reader goes into it knowing these two characters Betsy and Andy will wind up having sex that leads to Paige’s conception. That gave the part a driving energy as readers turn the pages to find out exactly how and when that happened.
In my original draft, once the reader found out the real story, they still had about one hundred pages left to read, but the “mystery” had already been solved. So my agent suggested that I take the story apart and put it back together again. Instead of three parts, she thought I should try to weave the past and present timelines together.
After I got over the anxiety of how much work that would be, I knew she was right. So I cleaned off my kitchen counter and printed out a fifty-page chapter-by-chapter outline. I had the present-day chapters in a blue font and the 1974 chapters in a red font so they were easy to tell apart.
I went all arts-and-crafts on the project, cutting the outline and taping pieces of the chapters together. After that, I physically laid the structure out on my kitchen counter and used Post-it notes as placeholders for the new scenes I would have to write (about four or five total). It was incredible the way the past and present stories flowed together. It was like it was meant to be that way.
There was one more thing I needed to do before the book was complete. I thought it was only right to take a DNA test of my own. But I wasn’t going to do it alone—I got my family to join me under the guise of a holiday gift.
In December of 2019, when my family was together for the holidays, I handed an identically wrapped box to all the adults in my family—my mom, my dad, his girlfriend, my sister, and my brother-in-law. I made them open the gifts at the same time, and they laughed when they saw the Ancestry.com tests. But the joke was on me, because my dad got up and handed his own identically wrapped boxes to myself, my sister, and my brother-in-law. Apparently, he had the same idea, only he’d gifted us 23andMe kits.
From what I know about my family history, I have roots in Germany, Russia, and, I believe, Czechoslovakia. I’d been hoping to find some specifics, but the results were pretty broad and unsurprising. It turns out I’m 99.5% Ashkenazi Jewish and 0.3% Eastern European. And in case you’re wondering, all of my family members who took the test showed up on my family tree. No unexpected connections. At least not yet.
One last thing I’d like to call out is that the NPE (Not Parent Expected) Facebook group is a real community. It’s a very private network that only allows in people who have a Not Parent Expected. I am not a member of the group, and all the posts mentioned in this book are fictional, based on a few articles I’ve read and some of the stories I’ve heard about how these DNA surprises unfold.
So that’s the story behind the story of Little Pieces of Me. Thanks so much for spending a little piece of your time with Paige, Betsy, and Andy.
Reading Group Guide
Do you think Andy suspected Paige was his child? If so, do you think he took the DNA test in hopes of connecting with her?
Paige is dealing with a crisis of identity. She lost her job, is about to get married, and then finds out about her Not Parent Expected. How much do your job, your family, or your social status play into your identity and how you see yourself?
Have you taken a DNA test? If you have, why did you decide to do so? If you haven’t, would you consider it? Why or why not? If the DNA test revealed surprising information, would it change the way you see yourself or your family?
Do you think Betsy made the best choice for herself and her daughter by leading Mark to believe the baby was his? Do you think Mark ever suspected?
Paige tells her mom that she forgives her, and Elizabeth gets upset and says she doesn’t need forgiveness for something that happened before Paige was born. What do you think about that? Did Elizabeth owe Paige an apology for anything?
Paige’s group of friends all struggle with feeling different at some point in their lives. It’s one of the things they have in common. Have you ever felt different? How did you deal with those feelings? Do you have any groups of friends where you’re the same kind of different?
In college, William is not very accepting of Andy’s desire to stay closeted, even though William himself had a traumatic experience coming out. What do you think of their relationship? In what ways was it good, and in what ways was it destructive?
Do you think Maks made the right decision to trick Paige into going to Naples? How do you think he should have handled the situation, knowing what is best for his friend even if that friend doesn’t see it?
Paige feels a lot of anxiety over her perceived judgment from both society and her younger sister about being an “old” bride. Do you think the wedding industry caters to young brides? Do you agree with Elizabeth that love at any age deserves to be celebrated?
Paige and Elizabeth have a conversation about different kinds of love throughout one’s life. What kind of love do you think Elizabeth and Mark had? What kind of love do Paige and Jeff have? Has the kind of love you look for changed over time?
What do you think Paige and Andy’s relationship will look like in the next five years? Do you think Andy and Elizabeth will have any relationship at all? How about Paige and Frannie?
Also by Alison Hammer
You and Me and Us
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
P.S.™ is a trademark of HarperCollins Publishers.
LITTLE PIECES OF ME. Copyright © 2021 by Alison Hammer. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Cover design by Laura Klynstra
Cover photographs © rangizzz/Shutterstock (frames); © Gennady Grechishkin/Shutterstock (woman in black and white); © Lyudmila2509/Shutterstock (vintage photo); © Fox & Lemonade/Stocksy United (woman)
FIRST EDITION
Digital Edition APRIL 2021 ISBN: 978-0-06-293488-8
Version 02192021
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-293487-1 (paperback)
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-305942-9 (hardcover library edition)
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