Tells the story of a third-generation Italian-American woman's struggle to understand the haunting contradictions of her family legacy: her father, who beat his two sons, also tended the most delicately beautiful garden in the neighborhood. Her mother, who alone spoke against racism in a narrowly Catholic working-class community, wrote feminist sermons for a progressive parish priest, who also suffered from agoraphobic fears strong enough to keep her inside the house for seven years.