Books |
Angela’s Ashes
Frank McCourt
By
Published: Jul 20, 2009
Category:
Memoir
Angela’s Ashes, the first of Frank McCourt’s memoirs, touched me deeply. And not just for itself. It took me back, to when I was 15 and in my first year at boarding school. That was the year I was under the spell of James Joyce. First, Dubliners, then A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. We talked about these books in English class, and I thought about them in my 8′ by 10′ dorm room, and after a while I decided that I’d been a Jew long enough — I was going to convert to Catholicism.
This was, of course, not about Jesus in the least. It was about Ireland. The peat. The mist. The pubs. The priests and their secrets. The omnipresence of death. The cooking smells. The accents.
A friend correctly pointed out that I’d get close to none of that by converting to Catholicism. I returned to sanity shortly thereafter. My Irish fascination also cooled — since then, my closest connections to the Emerald Isle are Van Morrison and John O’Donohue.
Frank McCourt changed all that with an improbable memoir — improbable because he spent 30 years teaching high school English in New York public schools and, only as he was leaving the classroom, sat down to write. “Angela’s Ashes” was a huge hit, the #1 nonfiction book of 1996 and then a film. I interviewed him early in 1997; clearly, he was enjoying himself immensely.
He certainly can’t be said to have had an enjoyable childhood. His parents were poor. His father drank. In five and a half years, his mother had six children — and three of them died. There was no indoor plumbing. Little food.
A downer? Not at all. Though horrifying, the book is incredibly funny. The reason: McCourt waited to write until he was beyond bitterness. "I couldn’t have written this book 15 years ago because I was carrying a lot of baggage around," he says. "I had attitudes, and these attitudes had to be softened. I had to become, as it says in the Bible, as a child, and the child started to speak in this book. And that was the only way to do it, without judging."
McCourt wouldn’t judge, but everyone else did. And they all said pretty much the same thing: McCourt does for Limerick what Joyce did for Dublin.
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