Angela's Ashes: A Memoir
by Frank McCourt
Summary
This is Frank McCourt's own account of a childhood spent crossing back and forth between two countries and never having enough of anything. Born in Brooklyn to Irish immigrant parents, McCourt was four when the family returned to Ireland during the Depression and settled in Limerick, and the memoir he tells in a child's close, unadorned voice follows the Limerick years in unsparing detail: two infant siblings who die, a father whose charm never converts into steady wages because he drinks what little the family has, and a mother, Angela, left to stretch nothing into meals for the surviving children.
McCourt narrates his own near death from typhoid fever at eleven, the humiliations of a poverty severe enough that he stole food and coal to keep the family fed, and his father's eventual abandonment of them altogether, all without asking the reader for pity the narrator himself refuses to ask for. The book's power comes from that refusal: McCourt renders genuine hardship with real humor and an eye for the absurd rather than despair, so that scenes of hunger and shame sit next to scenes of real tenderness and dark comedy on the same page. It ends as the young McCourt, having saved money from odd jobs, boards a ship back to America at nineteen to begin the life he had been dreaming of since Limerick.
Reading the memoir means spending time inside that unblinking child's voice for its full length, a book that treats grim material with warmth rather than sentiment and expects the reader to laugh as often as wince. It suits a reader who wants a coming of age story told from real poverty without a trace of self pity, in a voice that made McCourt, previously a New York City schoolteacher publishing his first book past sixty, into one of the most read memoirists of his generation.
Historical Context & Significance
Angela's Ashes won the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography and the National Book Critics Circle Award the year before, beating Pulitzer finalists Kim Barnes's In the Wilderness and Hershel Parker's first volume on Herman Melville. The book became an immediate bestseller and made McCourt, who had spent decades teaching high school in New York before publishing it, a literary celebrity at sixty six.
Reception in Limerick itself was far more divided than in America; some residents disputed parts of his account as exaggerated, while others defended it as a true picture of working class life in the city in those years. Alan Parker directed a 1999 film adaptation, and McCourt went on to extend the story in two further memoirs, one covering his early adulthood in New York and one about his long career as a teacher.