The Role of Parenting

Thirteen Doorways, Wolves Behind Them All explores how both selfish and selfless parents fulfill their parental roles.

One of the main characters is a teenage girl named Frankie Mazza, and she has first-hand knowledge of the ways a parent ignore the role they are supposed to play. Frankie and her siblings, Toni and Vito, were left in the orphanage for a brief stay once when their mother as in a mental asylum. They returned a few years later when their father, Gaspare, announced that their mother died giving birth to a baby. While Gaspare was healthy and employed, he was one of many parents who could not take care of children during the years after the Great Depression and chose to let the Catholic Church raise them in an orphanage. Frankie and her siblings grow up believing that their mother died, but they...