Undressing the Moon by T. Greenwood. St. Martin’s Press: 256 pages. $23.95.

Thirty-year-old Piper Kincaid has breast cancer, and she’s not getting better. The doctors’ original hopefulness fades, her bones ache with pain from the spreading disease, and her insurance company has denied funding for her last hope: a bone marrow transplant.

Though “Undressing the Moon,” T. Greenwood’s new novel, focuses a dying woman’s inner life, it also meditates on the power of motherhood and the devastating consequences of its absence. Ultimately, Greenwood tells a story of aftermath, of the ways we rearrange our lives’ broken pieces.

Greenwood creates a collage of past and present for Piper to wander through as “a reluctant but proud curator of broken things.” Now that planning for the future is futile, Piper turns to the childhood events that both destroyed her and brought her to adulthood. Near the beginning of the novel, Piper attempts to clean out her closet, to consider what she might give away and to whom. This process begins a journey to the dark territory of her past, into which she ventures a bit at a time.

Her mother’s absence is at the center of Piper’s labyrinth of painful memories. Before she left the family, Piper’s mother spent time with her daughter, collecting bits of colored glass that the two of them found on the edge of the nearby pond, which she recycled into stained glass windows. What others had thrown away, she made into things of beauty, an art Piper learns and later applies to herself.

As a child, Piper believes her mother powerful enough to bring about a lunar eclipse—she calls her “sorceress” and “magician.” And her mother really did bring about an eclipse of sorts, an eclipse of her own presence that leaves Piper like a lost child in a fairytale: “I don’t know what happened to that girl,” Piper muses. “I think she became lost a long time ago. I picture her wandering through the damp, dark woods of my past, looking for home.”

After Piper’s mother leaves, Piper becomes lovers with Nick Hammer, a widowed English teacher, and the director of “The Sound of Music,” in which Piper plays Liesl, another motherless child. Through “The Sound of Music” Piper finds her voice, as a singer and a woman. Through Nick, she finds the love and attention she craves. Their precarious love, like their duet as Liesl and the Captain singing “Edelweiss,” is two voices twining in common grief.

Most of Greenwood’s chapters end with a reminder of the book’s “broken” theme—a remark about broken glass or a broken person or an observation about the mutable nature of brokenness. Greenwood names Piper’s music teacher/lover “Nick Hammer,” as if he is part of the process of her “breaking.” And Piper wonders at “the absolute silence of glass after it is broken.” And her mother tells her, “sometimes things need to get broken.” The reminders grow heavy-handed and the reader may question just where that hand is leading her.

In particular, the statement that “sometimes things need to get broken” (also suggested in the novel’s epigraph) is hard to apply to Piper’s life. Piper’s desperate need for love and affection, the rapes she is subjected to, her difficulty forming relationships, and the cancer that breaks her physically are all traumas for which there could be no need. The suggestion that these might be necessary events is absurd at best.

Still, the image of light shining behind broken glass is seductive. Piper remembers her mother’s observation that, “it was not the glass that was beautiful, but the quality of light behind it.” That light might well take the form of Piper’s best friend, Becca, the only constant in her life. Becca never needs instructions; she is simply present, urging Piper toward life, always. Through Becca, Greenwood suggests that women’s relationships with each other are perhaps the most enduring of all, the source of light that shines through the stained-glass windows of our lives. Broken glass, Greenwood hints, isn’t meant to be fixed, but to become something else, something equally valuable to whomever finds it.

    Wendy L. Smith teaches English at San Diego Mesa College.