Angela's Ashes

" When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I managed to survive at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood [...]
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" When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I managed to survive at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood. "
So begins the luminous memoir of Frank McCourt, born in Depression-era Brooklyn to recent Irish immigrants and raised in the slums of Limerick, Ireland. Frank s mother, Angela, has no money to feed the children since Frank s father, Malachy, rarely works, and when he does he drinks his wages. Yet Malachy exasperating, irresponsible, and beguiling does nurture in Frank an appetite for the one thing he can provide: a story. Frank lives for his father s tales of Cuchulain, who saved Ireland, and of the Angel on the Seventh Step, who brings his mother babies.
Perhaps it is story that accounts for Frank s survival. Wearing rags for diapers, begging a pig s head for Christmas dinner and gathering coal from the roadside to light a fire, Frank endures poverty, near-starvation and the casual cruelty of relatives and neighbors yet lives to tell his tale with eloquence, exuberance, and remarkable forgiveness.
"Angela s Ashes, " imbued on every page with Frank McCourt s astounding humor and compassion, is a glorious book that bears all the marks of a classic.