Me (Moth)
45 pages • 1-hour read
Amber McBrideMe (Moth)
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Pages 123-182Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes sexual content and discussion of substance use, mental illness, domestic violence, child abuse, physical injury, and death.
Pages 123-153 Summary
Note: These pages contain the poems “On Our Way to North Carolina,” “Ghost Town in the Sky, Maggie Valley, North Carolina,” “Holding My Breath,” “Sunrise Inn Motel,” “Billy Tripp’s Mindfield, Brownsville, Tennessee,” “Home,” “The Bluebird Cafe, Nashville Tennessee,” “Dust #3,” “Motel Whatever,” “Willow: Nashville Cemetery,” “Bruises,” “Motel Guitar Lessons,” “Time Is Nothing But An Illusion,” “Fort Smith National Historic Site, Arkansas,” “Time Travel Motel,” “Motel Morning Rituals (With Sani),” “Pinnacle Mountain State Park, Arkansas,” “It Feels Like the Second World,” and “Storytelling.”
Moth and Sani continue their drive, talking and singing along the way. They study and remark on the surrounding landscapes. One day, Moth notices Sani taking his pills again. She can feel his mood changing afterwards. She muses on how quickly they have grown attached to each other, sleeping “like twin ghost stories in a book” (126) every night. She worries that he has become quiet and withdrawn, particularly when he refuses to sing.
Meanwhile, the two continue to make their planned stops, but end up visiting or idling in places they haven’t planned. They visit Billy Tripp’s Mindfield, The Bluebird Cafe, Willow Mount Cemetery, and Fort Smith. They talk about their ancestors, and Moth starts opening up more about her grandfather and the Hoodoo tradition. At night, they continue to hold each other, making promises to be there for one another.
Some places they visit upset them more than others. At the Bluebird Cafe, for example, Moth realizes she was there with her mother a year before the accident. She becomes emotional and flees the cafe; Sani races to her side and holds her. Another day, Sani incorporates references to his stepfather’s abuse into their “Summer Song.” At the cemetery with the willow, Moth digs up a photo, feather, and shock of hair she and her grandfather buried there when she was only 10. Sani marvels at the revelations.
After this stop, Moth notices more of Sani’s sadness surfacing. He tells her more about his parents’ fraught relationship and divorce in the days following, and admits that he has always needed his pills—although he feels less dependent on them when he is with Moth.
Meanwhile, Sani starts giving Moth guitar lessons. After playing together one night, they start touching and kissing, their bodies wrapping around each other. Moth feels as if they have known each other for many years. At another motel on a different night, they lie together listening to the rain and telling each other stories. Moth finally opens up about what happened to her family. Sani tries to comfort her, but Moth gets upset. Then they start laughing and crying at the same time.
The next day, they visit Pinnacle Mountain State Park, and Sani tells her more Diné myths. They get caught in the rain, strip off their clothes, and jump into a lake for a swim. While getting dressed afterwards, Moth peeks at Sani’s naked body.
Pages 154-182 Summary
Note: These pages include the poems “Car Ride: Storytelling,” “Stafford Air & Space Museum, Weatherford, Oklahoma,” “The Lighthouse, Palo Duro Canyon State Park, Texas,” “Cadillac Ranch, Amarillo, Texas,” “Dream Love: Motel,” “Luna Moth,” “Navajo Nation, Four Corners, New Mexico,” “Cocoon,” “Four Corners,” “Cocoon,” “We Fold Down the Seats & Sleep in the Back of the Jeep,” “I Also Dream,” “Car Ride to Window Rock,” “Kissing Sani (Feels Like…),” “Window Rock,” “Almost at Sani’s House & Moths Pepper the Windshield,” “Sani’s Home,” “How to Make PB&J According to Sani,” “Sani’s Room,” and “‘Samson,’ A Song By Regina Spektor.”
Back in the car, Moth and Sani share more stories with each other as they drive. They also overtly express their feelings for each other. As they continue their travels through Oklahoma, Texas, and on to the Four Corners, they stop at the Stafford Air and Space Museum, Palo Duro Canyon State Park, and Window Rock. They reflect on the history, meaning, and feeling of each place as they go.
At a motel one night, Moth and Sani have sex for the first time. Sani falls asleep afterwards, but Moth stays awake replaying the encounter and feeling happy. She muses on the moth’s developmental stages, too.
When the two reach the Four Corners region—where Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah touch—Sani tells Moth about his ancestral connection to the land. Back in the car, he remarks on Moth’s scar. He makes her think about it in a new way.
Later that night, the two camp out in the car, lying awake, studying the sky, and sharing myths. Moth dreams about her grandfather that night. In the dream, her grandfather is interacting with Sani, showing him affection. In the morning, Moth reflects on what it’s like to be with Sani, comparing their intimacy to many other things. Finally, they arrive at Window Rock, “the capital of the Navajo Nation” (174), traveling on to Sani’s house from there.
The two arrive at Sani’s house, where Sani’s father greets him as if he knew he was coming. Sani makes him and Moth peanut butter sandwiches and shows her his room. Moth immediately notices a picture Sani drew of a dancing girl who strikingly resembles her. In the image, the girl is also wearing a feather that resembles the one they found at a graveyard along the way. Moth pulls out the photo she’s been carrying of her and her grandfather and stacks it with the feather and Sani’s drawing. Then they play music by Regina Spektor and curl up together. Instead of taking his pills that night, Sani throws them away.
Pages 123-182 Analysis
Moth and Sani’s road trip reflects Friendship and Love as Pathways to Healing. Since both characters have experienced childhood trauma, domestic violence, and physical and emotional abuse, their healing process is not linear or straightforward. Neither Moth nor Sani can conceptualize what it means to recover from their trauma, because it feels ongoing: Moth still cannot forgive herself for her parents and brother’s death and was just abandoned by her aunt, a person with an alcohol dependency; meanwhile, Sani is living with his emotionally unsupportive mother and his physically abusive stepfather, separated from his biological father and ancestral heritage, while living with an unspecified mental illness.
These facets of Moth and Sani’s stories make their journeys to healing meandering and inexact, much like the road trip itself. While the two do follow through with their plans to stop at various landmarks, they also end up visiting cemeteries they hadn’t expected to pass, swimming naked in lakes in national parks, and camping out under the stars in the Jeep. Such unplanned moments along their cross-country venture echo the unexpected moments in Moth’s and Sani’s character arcs. For example, Moth doesn’t expect Sani to retreat into himself, pulling away from her, when he takes his pills. Likewise, Sani can’t plan for Moth’s emotional moment when they end up at a cafe she visited with her mother three years prior.
Despite such unexpected moments along the way, Moth and Sani remain steadfast in their commitment to each other. In the poem “Time Travel Motel,” for example, Moth reveals the truth of her trauma to Sani for the first time, immediately overcome with a need “to fly, to escape” (147). Despite this impulse, Moth doesn’t run away from Sani as he begs her to stay by his side because “Everything is too loud without you” (147). He comforts Moth in her moment of vulnerable intimacy, but also admits his need for her. Their mutual reliance offers them security and grounding amidst their otherwise atypical journeys towards personal growth.
For Moth, healing is a form of physical, emotional, and spiritual transformation rather than a mere recovery process. In these pages, an increasing number of allusions to the cocoon pepper the poems, indicating that Moth has entered the next stage of personal development. The cocoon is “a shell a caterpillar creates,” “the first magic trick,” [and] “another boundary” (165). While the cocoon is an external covering that mirrors the egg (or, another boundary between the vulnerable, mutating individual and the external world), it is different from the egg in that it begets the ultimate stage of transformation. Inside the cocoon, the caterpillar “hardens again” (167), but this time into a new form.
Moth’s ability to enter this next stage of development illustrates her ability to confront her past versions of self and to envision a new future. She is no longer trapped in her “egg of a room / at Aunt Jack’s, my egg of a life in Virginia” (168) but is exploring the world beyond. Her adventures with Sani—both good, challenging, and bad—are reforming her spirit into a creature that will once more be able to fly.
Moth and Sani’s arrival at Sani’s dad’s home in New Mexico marks a turning point in the narrative plot line. The two have completed their planned journey and do not know what to anticipate next. At the same time, the uncanny moment in Sani’s bedroom foreshadows coming discoveries about their respective past lives. Moth notices the image Sani drew of her before they met, and they realize the feather in the drawing is the same feather they found on their trip.
These seemingly mystical overlaps in their experiences portend revelations about their personal histories, feeding into the theme of Cultural Inheritance as a Form of Self-Recognition. Both Moth and Sani are still learning how to balance their fraught familial pasts with their deeper ancestral histories. They want to honor their roots, but have trouble doing so in light of their childhood trauma. Sharing stories from their cultures and discovering overlaps in their personal histories over the course of their trip help them to seek out roads to self-recognition together.
Unlock all 45 pages of this Study Guide
Get in-depth, chapter-by-chapter summaries and analysis from our literary experts.
- Grasp challenging concepts with clear, comprehensive explanations
- Revisit key plot points and ideas without rereading the book
- Share impressive insights in classes and book clubs