Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt
Review by Carmen M. Walsh

In one way or another, strong women kept Frank McCourt alive, and educated, until his 19th birthday. His determined mother (Angela), pushy aunts, and unforgiving grandmother; a Shakespeare-reading diphtheria-stricken girl; and a sherry-drinking loan shark. But in this memoir, McCourt puts no one on a pedestal; instead, he captures the honest details of his childhood—a childhood that, in all its despair, shaped him into a compassionate adult.

With the Irish gift for telling tales, McCourt explains up front that this is going to be an unhappy story, a story of “a miserable Irish Catholic childhood.” But it’s clear that the story will also be a humorous one—and irreverently so—when McCourt reveals that Limerick had a pious reputation only because the churches were the one dry refuge in a world of wetness.

McCourt was born in America, the result of an impulsive first meeting between two Irish immigrants in New York City: his father, an ex-IRA alchoholic from Northern Ireland; his mother, a disappointment to her family in Limerick because she couldn’t (or wouldn’t) curtsy properly. The New York portion of the book, while brief, includes not only Irish, but also Italian and Jewish characters, revealing a delightful mixture of religions, foods, and accents in the melting pot of the early 1930s—a mixture that is highly entertaining when told from a child’s point of view.

But life in America was not kind to the family. When McCourt was only four years old, his parents decided to return to Ireland, hoping for support from their families back home. The book then chronicles the remainder of his childhood in Ireland, rich with scenes of family and school life.

Things almost always went wrong for the McCourts, so there is plenty of heartache. There were few days with sufficient food and flea-free beds. But there was laughter too. Even while the drunken father’s neglect tears at your heart, you can’t help but grin at him waking his children in the middle of the night to sing Irish political ditties, promising them a nickel for ice cream if they promise him to “die for Ireland”—a nickel they never get.

McCourt’s detailed scenes recall significant childhood moments to which everyone can relate: the first experience with death, early discoveries about sex, interpretations of the mysteries of religion. They recall the pain and inner conflict when a loved one, especially a parent, disappoints. Regardless of location, the stories of childhood are universal; told by McCourt, the stories come to life.

Ignoring conventions, such as quotation marks to indicate dialogue, McCourt pulls the reader right into the story. He uses repetition of phrases, like the oral storytellers of old, to create a rhythm that invites further reading. The meanings of Irish words throughout the book may at times be unclear, but the Irish words themselves are usually still more than adequate to communicate the characters’ personalities.

Anyone offended by jokes about religion or sex, or by talk about human excrement and parasites, should not read this book. Most, however, will savor the honestly told, heart-rending, gut-busting Irish celebration of childhood and women that is Angela’s Ashes.