An Understated Story of Grace Under Fire

UNDRESSING THE MOON

A Novel

By T. Greenwood

St. Martin’s

256 pages; $23.95

Rarely has a writer rendered such highly charged topics as maternal abandonment, rape and the prospect of premature death to so wrenching, yet so beautifully understated, an effect. In her third work of fiction, “Undressing the Moon,” author T. Greenwood takes on risky subject matter, handling her volatile topics with admirable restraint.

Piper Kinkaid adores her artist mother, a woman who takes great pleasure in working with bits of bright-colored glass, but cannot endure her marriage to Piper’s unsympathetic father. And despite her attachment to her children, she leaves the family.

Greenwood’s protagonist, 14-year-old Piper, is devastated by the loss of her mother, a woman whose artistic sensibilities had always especially enchanted her young daughter. But if this loss were not devastating enough, Piper’s father soon takes up with a violently unstable woman, leaving the care of his daughter almost entirely to her older brother Quinn.

Greenwood achieves a somber, unsensational tone by staying close to her protagonist’s interior life, as we are let into Piper’s lonely ponderings about her mother and how she will carry on without her. Piper pursues music and is soon taken on as something of a protege by her school’s music teacher, Mr. Hammer, a lonely widower.

But even the steady-seeming Mr. Hammer proves fallible and his involvement with Piper ultimately causes the girl further pain. Mr. Hammer’s initial solicitous attention causes Piper to feel deeply noticed, cared for: “He picked up his hands and looked at me. When he smiled, I noticed that his bottom teeth were a little crooked. I also noticed the faintest dimple in his left cheek. He could easily have been a boy instead of a man.

“‘No, you don’t need to sing today. I’m just listening to you breathe. It helps me to figure out where to begin.’

“I thought about breathing, and coughed. He handed me a glass of water, which I accepted.

“After I went home, I lay down on my bed, closed my eyes, and listened to myself breathe. I’d never paid attention before, to the rhythms of my breath. It seemed strange to me, that he was sitting there the whole time, listening to something I didn’t even know I was doing. It felt as if he’d overheard my dreams.”

Greenwood intercuts the beginning narrative set during Piper’s adolescence with sequences from the character’s adult life. At the age of 30, Piper learns that she has advanced breast cancer. While a common-enough literary strategy, Greenwood handles the back-and-forth movement in time with wonderful deftness. She manages to keep Piper’s voice both consistent with the past and changed, reflecting a new maturity and a deeper, more resonant sadness. In these sections, Piper’s emotional world, becomes more distressingly layered. This despite her ongoing relationships with Quinn, her aunt Boo and her old and dear friend Becca, who has come to take care of her. For Piper must face the likelihood of her own early death.

Yet drama never descends into melodrama. Piper quickly learns that in accepting help from loved ones, she must also spare them in small and not so small ways. With encouragement from Becca, Piper tries a new anticancer drug, but soon finds the Tamoxifen is not working, a fact she withholds from her friend. Deciding that her next task must be to organize her life, Piper begins with the easier parts:

“We lie to each other to save each other, and we keep some secrets to save ourselves. So when I open the door of my closet and walk in, through the sleeves of summer dresses and boxes of letters and collected things, I tell her I’m only spring cleaning. That the sunshine and blue sky have inspired me to organize my life.”

Ultimately more about life than death, “Undressing the Moon” beautifully elucidates the human capacity to maintain grace under unrelenting fire.