Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt
You're missing out if you haven’t read Angela’s Ashes yet! I read it years ago and am re-reading it now because I’m taking a memoir writing class. This book is one of the best memoirs ever.
In that memoir writing course, we learned that three persons are involved in a memoir: narrator, character, and author. The narrator tells the story, gives meaning to things that happen and explains or describes things. The character is the person the memoir is about. You’d think that would be the author. But in this construct, the author is what I think of as “the decider.” The author — you, the memoir writer — decides what will and will not be included in the book.
Angela’s Ashes has almost no narrator. It is nearly entirely the characters speaking. The whole story is written through the eyes of and with the voice of Frank McCourt. After a few pages of background that I can imagine being spoken like a voiceover by the mature Frank McCourt, it begins with Frank at three years old in a playground in Brooklyn. When he is four, the family moves back to Limerick, Ireland, a terrible decision as Frank says. Angela, his mother, had six children in 5-1/2 years, and three of them died in childhood. His father was an outsider in Limerick because he was from the North of Ireland, and an alcoholic. He could not keep a job and the few times he did work, he drank away the money he made. Angela and the kids survived — barely — because they received some help from charitable organizations. They lived in unbelievable squalor, hunger, and poverty. Yet somehow, the book makes you laugh as well as cry and shake your head in disbelief.
The church does not help the family and often shuts the door, literally, in their faces. The schoolmasters are harsh but Frank does learn a lot, including poetry, which is part of schooling and home life. When Frank’s dad comes home drunk, he lines the brothers up and makes them sing about dying for Ireland. Frank writes:
The master says it’s a glorious thing to die for the Faith and Dad says it’s a glorious thing to die for Ireland and I wonder if there’s anyone in the world who would like us to live. (p. 113*)
Frank’s descriptions of life growing up in a Catholic Irish family are sometimes hilarious:
[Describing his First Communion] Then he [the priest] placed on my tongue the wafer, the body and blood of Jesus. At last, at last.
It’s on my tongue. I drew it back.
It stuck.
I had God glued to the roof of my mouth. I could hear the master’s voice, Don’t let that host touch your teeth for if you bite God in two you’ll roast in hell for eternity.
I tried to get God down with my tongue but the priest hissed at me, Stop that clucking and get back to your seat.
God was good. He melted and I swallowed Him and now, at last, I was a member of the True Church, an official sinner.
Later that same morning, Frank got sick, gagged, and threw his breakfast all up in his grandma’s backyard.
Look at what he did. Thrun up his First Communion breakfast. Thrun up the body and blood of Jesus. I have God in me backyard.
Swallowing God and then throwing Him up, causing your grandma to “have God in me backyard.”
Frank writes about the first bit of Shakespeare he ever read.
I do believe, induced by potent circumstances
That thou art mine enemy.I don’t know what it means and I don’t care because it’s Shakespeare and it’s like having jewels in my mouth when I say the words. (p. 196*)
I love that—words “like having jewels in my mouth.” I often say that certain sentences are gems; they glow from the page like rubies and emeralds.
His father looms large in the book. He cannot seem to control his drinking, and the whole family suffers from it. It’s easy to think his drinking is the cause of death for the children who die. That is incredibly hard to forgive. How can anyone choose alcohol over the life of their children? Frank is realistic in his portrayal of his father.** He tells of the mornings when he and his father are up before the rest of the family. His dad lights the fire, makes tea for everyone, and reads the newspaper to Frank. He writes of the evenings when his father tells them mythical and historical stories and listens to their prayers. These are beautiful, tender moments. Yet, over and over his father drinks away all their means of living.
I think my father is like the Holy Trinity with three people in him, the one in the morning with the paper, the one at night with the stories and the prayers, and then the one who does the bad thing and comes home with the smell of whiskey and wants us to die for Ireland.
I feel sad over the bad thing but I can’t back away from him because the one in the morning is my real father and if I were in Amercia I could say, I love you, Dad… (p. 210*)
“like the Holy Trinity.” What a way to describe it. How true it is that we love the real person, like his dad in the morning, while still feeling sad and sometimes angry about the persons we love, with three or more people in them.
Sometimes, there’s a delightful turn of phrase in the conversation Frank records. His uncle Pat, who was brain-damaged from gas in the war, sang “The Road to Rasheen.”
He kept saying, Rasheen, Rasheen, mavourneen mean, and the song made no sense because his father dropped him on his head long ago and every time he sang that song he had different words. Grandma said that was a fine song and Pa Keating said Caruso better look over his shoulder. (p. 84*)
“Caruso better look over his shoulder.” Don’t you love it?
Angela’s Ashes is a joy to read.
* Angela’s Ashes. By Frank McCourt. Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc.. Copyright 1996 by Frank McCourt. August 2016.