Ten years after her mother’s death, Smith visited her sister Linda in Philadelphia to sort through their mother’s belongings. Among the photographs was one of their mother at age 20 standing beside a teenage boy labeled “cousin Joey,” the youngest son of their mother’s uncle Joe. Smith was struck by her strong resemblance to Joey, far more pronounced than any likeness she shared with Grant, the man who raised her. The discovery revived a long-standing family suspicion, first voiced by her grandmother, that Smith may have been the product of incest between her mother and Joe.

Seeking clarity, Smith and Linda underwent DNA testing. The results confirmed that they were half-sisters, establishing that Grant was not Smith’s biological father. She struggled with the emotional weight of the possibility of incest within her family history. Further testing overturned this assumption, however. Smith’s genetic profile revealed Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry and identified another man, Sidney, as her biological father. Upon seeing his photograph, she experienced an immediate sense of recognition.

The chapter then reconstructs the circumstances surrounding Smith’s conception during WWII. Her mother, young and vulnerable, got pregnant while living in her uncle Joe’s household. Suspicion and denial created conflict within the family, ultimately forcing her mother to leave Philadelphia under the weight of secrecy. Smith situates her family story within broader histories of Jewish migration, displacement, and wartime survival. The chapter concludes with the acceptance of an expanded identity in a meditation on what we inherit, what we carry, and what we are finally able to put down.

The memoir’s final chapter begins with Smith in a period of spiritual unrest. Once sustained by youthful conviction and artistic certainty, she now confronted doubt, exhaustion, and fragmentation. Writing felt strained, and questions about belief, suffering, and the purpose of art pressed upon her. Christian imagery of Christ, the saints, and martyrdom merges with reflections on artistic masterpieces, suggesting that art serves as both a response to pain and a search for sublimity.

Travel becomes the chapter’s organizing structure. Moving through New England, Martha’s Vineyard, Italy, Trieste, Bologna, Eastern Europe, France, Bogotá, Smith felt the boundary between dream and reality blur. Mysterious encounters, disembodied voices, symbolic lights, and insects reflected her psychological disorientation and longing for coherence. In Europe, her attention turned to sacred art and historical suffering. She studied sculptures of Christ by Renaissance masters like Michelangelo and reflected on the Holocaust and Hiroshima, contemplating humanity’s capacity for both cruelty and awe-inspiring achievement. She wondered whether creative ambition reflects spiritual devotion or merely the persistence of pride. In Bogotá, illness and altitude sickness forced a confrontation with her physical vulnerability, yet music sustained her. Smith affirms a faith rooted in myth, imagination, and art’s capacity to hold what could not otherwise be borne.

In Nice, France, overlooking the Bay of Angels, Smith experienced a surge of creative energy so consuming that she likens it to channeling Irish novelist James Joyce. Her writing became ecstatic and physically intense; a storm seemed to mirror her internal upheaval.

Smith shifts into dreamlike imagery of revolutionaries, saints, mythical creatures, and ancestral landscapes that herald a spiritual and psychological journey. Shedding illusion and pride, she recognizes that what endures is love—above all, her children’s love. A child’s voice declares, “I am you” (44), uniting her restless, searching self and her grounded one. The chapter ends with acceptance of the idea that life and death, doubt and devotion, and rebellion and responsibility can coexist within a single, integrated identity. Smith’s vagabond’s wandering is revealed as a homecoming.