Mark Doty's memoir recounts its author's years as a young boy until his early adolescence. In the late 50's and early 60's, Doty's father works as an engineer. Mark's older sister, Sally, is a moody teenager who is starting to find herself in the typical troubles of a rebellious teenager, but it's no doubt. Mark offers a depiction of his parents as estranged from each other by their own unspoken emotional issues, and to make matters worse, Mark's father works as an engineer and has to move around often to take projects.
Mark tells a series of unconnected stories, tied together by the image of a Dutch perspective box, a sort of optical illusion model that makes everything appear in perspective. One time he finds himself singing and dancing in flamboyant costume, and his mother walks in and responds, "But you're a boy!" Her dismay at his flowery, colorful behavior continues throughout his childhood, and little by little, the young boy starts to discover that he might belong to the other sexual orientation, the one he starts to call, "The Wrong One."
Eventually the family settles in Arizona where Mark's father works building missiles. Sally, now a little bit older, has found herself in jail for her misbehavior. His mother has fallen to alcoholism and spends most of her time inebriated. Meanwhile, young Mark is figuring out that he loves the strange people in life the most. He listens to Stravinsky's Firebird Suite and finds himself dancing in religious ecstasy.
Sally finds herself a husband after her time in jail, but she picks a fundamentalist Christian whose judgmental attitude turns out to be hypocritical. The man leaves her for a younger girl and Sally is driven by rage and disappointment into a difficult life as a prostitute. There may be hope for her yet, though, when she finds a truly good man one day at a bar. This story complements the sexual repression that Mark experiences around his blossoming attraction to men.
Suddenly around the age of adolescence, Mark realizes that he really is gay. He also realizes without a doubt that his penchant for art, writing, poetry—those aren't things to be ashamed of. His desire for beauty is not an indication that he's broken, and neither is his attraction toward men. He notes that sometimes the very same qualities that hurt us deepest are the ones we need for our healing.
