Summary

Valley of the Moon – In Arizona, the author writes, his mother resumed her friendship with Mrs. Doyle, but did not do particularly well with her art. For his part, the author started crafting with glass, but found no real satisfaction in it. An art teacher described him as creating with more impulse than form, or consideration. Later, the author writes, a beautifully multi-colored glass bowl he created simply fell apart without being touched: the treatments he used to color the glass, he says, destabilized it.

Meanwhile, the author continues using present tense narration as he describes returning to his persona of being an outsider, and a nerd; developing his inner sexual life; and exploring religion. This happened in part, he writes, because of his mother’s increasingly intense participation in the spiritual life of an Episcopalian church, and partly because of his deepening...