#bookIlove : Angela's Ashes

Title: Angela's Ashes, by Frank McCourt
First time I read the book: when it was first published in 1996

Pat was always perplexed about how a relatively small country like Ireland could produce such a wealth of authors. Many of her favourite novelists were Irish.

Claudia was also a big fan of Irish authors and really enjoyed bleak works of squalor. She was the person who brought Angela's Ashes into my life. Sara was still more or less a baby, so my hormones were spiking every which way when I read it.

Even though I could hardly stand reading Frank McCourt's childhood memoir, also referred to as a misery memoir and a tragiccomic memoir, I could not put his book down. His prose was breathtaking. The stories he tells of his mother are heart-wrenchingly sad, poignant, and a true lesson of resilience.

At the same time, the poverty and suffering he and his siblings experienced principally at the hand of his alcoholic father made me so angry. Not only at his father, sometimes at his mother, neighbours, and the world in general. The fates had dealt him such arduous, impossible tasks to surmount, such that no child should face.

McCourt speaks of these horrors with such tenderness and grace; even today, when writing this, my eyes tear.

One more note: McCourt wrote this novel, his first, when he was sixty-six years old! You can't imagine how inspiring this is. He continued to write throughout his seventies as well. So there!