Happy St. Patrick’s Day, my bookworms. In honor of the holiday, the Irish spirit, and honoring a bit of my heritage (27% of it to be exact), I thought I’d pop in and give a long over-do suggestion of my favorite reads from an Irish author. I can’t believe in 5 years of this blog, I’ve never celebrated these works before, but I suppose better late than never so let’s celebrate the day and talk about Pulitzer Prize winning author, Frank McCourt!
I read Angela’s Ashes ages ago while I was on the road with my family in the green mountains of Vermont. I distinctly remember staying up until all hours just devouring the pages and my heart breaking at what Frank and his family had to endure in the rainy lanes of Limerick.
Imbued on every page with Frank McCourt’s astounding humor and compassion. This is a glorious book that bears all the marks of a classic.
“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 Pulitzer Prize winning 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.
I was so moved and inspired by time I closed the book that I wrote a letter to Mr. McCourt and was elated when he responded. To this day, it’s still one of my prized possessions.
Both ‘Tis and Teacher Man pick up shortly after Ashes leaves off and discuss Frank’s return to America and fulfilling the American Dream.
Though born in New York, Frank is now an outcast among the stylish, wealthy, and wasp-ish crowds decorating the glittering city streets. He’s fulfilled his dreams of making it back to American soil, but now he has to learn how to survive. ‘Tis tells us that story.
The sequel to Frank McCourt’s memoir of his Irish Catholic boyhood, Angela’s Ashes, picks up the story in October 1949, upon his arrival in America. Though he was born in New York, the family had returned to Ireland due to poor prospects in the United States. Now back on American soil, this awkward 19-year-old, with his “pimply face, sore eyes, and bad teeth,” has little in common with the healthy, self-assured college students he sees on the subway and dreams of joining in the classroom. Initially, his American experience is as harrowing as his impoverished youth in Ireland, including two of the grimmest Christmases ever described in literature. McCourt views the U.S. through the same sharp eye and with the same dark humor that distinguished his first memoir: race prejudice, casual cruelty, and dead-end jobs weigh on his spirits as he searches for a way out. A glimpse of hope comes from the army, where he acquires some white-collar skills, and from New York University, which admits him without a high school diploma. But the journey toward his position teaching creative writing at Stuyvesant High School is neither quick nor easy. Fortunately, McCourt’s openness to every variety of human emotion and longing remains exceptional; even the most damaged, difficult people he encounters are richly rendered individuals with whom the reader can’t help but feel uncomfortable kinship. The magical prose, with its singing Irish cadences, brings grandeur and beauty to the most sorrowful events, including the final scene, set in a Limerick graveyard.
Last in this trilogy of memoirs, is Teacher Man, and Frank’s life as us readers came to know him more recently. After a childhood of extreme poverty in Limerick, Ireland, a journey back to America to go back to school and make something of himself, McCourt tells the story of what came to be his thirty-year teaching career in New York.
McCourt’s long-awaited book about how his thirty-year teaching career shaped his second act as a writer.
Nearly a decade ago Frank McCourt became an unlikely star when, at the age of sixty-six, he burst onto the literary scene with Angela’s Ashes, the Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir of his childhood in Limerick, Ireland. Then came ‘Tis, his glorious account of his early years in New York.
Now, here at last, is McCourt’s long-awaited book about how his thirty-year teaching career shaped his second act as a writer. Teacher Man is also an urgent tribute to teachers everywhere. In bold and spirited prose featuring his irreverent wit and heartbreaking honesty, McCourt records the trials, triumphs and surprises he faces in public high schools around New York City. His methods anything but conventional, McCourt creates a lasting impact on his students through imaginative assignments (he instructs one class to write “An Excuse Note from Adam or Eve to God”), singalongs (featuring recipe ingredients as lyrics), and field trips (imagine taking twenty-nine rowdy girls to a movie in Times Square!).
McCourt struggles to find his way in the classroom and spends his evenings drinking with writers and dreaming of one day putting his own story to paper. Teacher Man shows McCourt developing his unparalleled ability to tell a great story as, five days a week, five periods per day, he works to gain the attention and respect of unruly, hormonally charged or indifferent adolescents. McCourt’s rocky marriage, his failed attempt to get a Ph.D. at Trinity College, Dublin, and his repeated firings due to his propensity to talk back to his superiors ironically lead him to New York’s most prestigious school, Stuyvesant High School, where he finally finds a place and a voice. “Doggedness,” he says, is “not as glamorous as ambition or talent or intellect or charm, but still the one thing that got me through the days and nights.”
For McCourt, storytelling itself is the source of salvation, and in Teacher Man the journey to redemption — and literary fame — is an exhilarating adventure.
Throughout the early 2000s, these books touched my soul. I admired Frank’s tenacity and learned so much from his life’s story. Over the years, I followed in his steps a little bit in my love of English Literature and the written word and always credited him and his wonderful stories as my tried-and-true inspirations. With the ever-growing list of books I’ve read and still have yet to read, it’s McCourt’s books that still sit at the top of my list as some of the best books I’ve ever read. On a day where many of us celebrate our Irish roots, I wanted to tip my hat to him, and his tales of Ireland. Sadly, he’s no longer with us, but his words remain. If you haven’t yet, I couldn’t suggest these three books more if I tried. They’re moving, funny, tragic, depressing, and real. If you’d like, there’s also a movie adaptation of Angela’s Ashes that I also recommend. Until next time, Sláinte!
