Angela's Ashes

From the book cover

“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 the Angel on the Seventh Step, who brings his mother babies.

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I'm starting to wonder if there is something wrong with me. I didn't shed a single tear while reading Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes. I didn't laugh either. I was impressed by his bravery in leaving nothing unsaid. The details of his impoverished childhood are painful and it's easy to see how embarrassing his situation would have been at the time, but what gets me is his honesty when describing the joy he got from masturbating. I could have done with less info about him "interfering" with himself.

I found myself annoyed with Frank's mother, Angela. She came across as a lazy whiner. I know times were tough, I get that. But she just seemed to spend too much time complaining about things. It took her forever to cross her legs and say no more kids. She was always threatening to go to work but didn't until the end of the novel. She often sent her kids to the pubs to do what she should have been doing - confronting her husband about drinking the money that was meant to feed the kids. The last straw for me was when she moved in with Frank and The Abbott and started taking the money Frank was earning from his messenger job.

There's much hype about Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes. I chose to read it because it is suppose to be one of the best memoirs ever published. It won the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography, the 1996 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 1997 Boeke Prize. I don't know if it lives up to all that hype.

McCourt’s childhood is definitely miserable, but doesn’t it take more than misery to make a book awesome? There's no denying that Angela’s Ashes is solid work in its genre, but it just left me feeling blah.  It didn’t elicit any strong emotion. It's just like every other book about people living unfortunate lives.

Some criticism of the book is that the poverty McCourt describes in Limerick is “overdone.” For his part, McCourt has said that the book is not meant to be an exact history.

 3.5/5

Movie Trailer for the film adaptation of Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes.