Angela's Ashes

First lines

My father and mother should have stayed in New York where they met and married and where I was born.

About this book

"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. in the 1930s and 40s. 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. - Jacket flap.

Themes & subjects

About the author

Frank McCourt

August 19, 1930 – July 19, 2009

Francis "Frank" McCourt was an Irish-American teacher and writer. He won the Pulitzer Prize (1997) and National Book Critics Circle Award (1996) for his memoir *Angela's Ashes* (1996), which details his childhood as a poor Irish Catholic in Limerick. He is also the author of *'Tis* (1999), which continues the narrative of his life, picking up from the end of the previous book and focusing on life as a new immigrant in America. *Teacher Man* (2005) detailed the challenges of being a young, uncertain teacher who must impart knowledge to his students. In 2002 he was awarded an honorary degree from the University of Western Ontario.