Angela's Ashes: A Memoir

A Pulitzer Prize–winning, #1 New York Times bestseller, Angela¡¯s Ashes is Frank McCourt¡¯s masterful memoir of his childhood in Ireland.

¡°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 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.

Angela¡¯s Ashes, imbued on every page with Frank McCourt¡¯s astounding humor and compassion, is a glorious book that bears all the marks of a classic.