Summary

In Chapters 13 and 14, the narrator takes the reader into Mia's past, starting with the fall of 1980, when Mia was eighteen and "she left home with two suitcases and her brother's love and without her parents' blessing" (187). Mia shared a special connection with her younger brother, Warren, whom she called "My Wren" (188). He was the only member of her family who had understood and supported her as an artist and photographer. Mia discovered photography at the age of eleven when she purchased a junk shop camera that "had lost its flash and neck strap," (189) and her passion grew into a skill with the help of their neighbor, Mr. Wilkinson. Mia's parents, unfortunately, did not approve of her photography as anything more than an expensive and pointless hobby, so when Mia was accepted into the New York School of Fine Arts, her parents refused to...