Summary

Firebird – The author begins this chapter with his description of his mother’s developing interest in art, and parallels her experience of blossoming and growing as a result with similar experiences he had with art. Those experiences, he says were rooted in being taught in school by Miss Tynes, who was more interested in various forms of art than in book learning, and who helped the author discover “some sense of the wildly various lenses through which the world might be seen” (67).

The author then parallels this side of his education with another – his experimentations with sex, undertaken with both boys and girls. He describes coming to an understanding that his mother knew what was going on with him in terms of same-sex attraction “perhaps my investigation of the opposite sex comes as a sort of relief?” (78). He also describes seeing his parents...