“When I look back on my childhood, I wonder how I survived 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...."
And who educated him and saved his life?
Good heavens . . . he sounds like a whiny-@ssed, professional malcontent.
Angela’s Ashes was a very good read.
You can have a tough childhood anywhere. Lots of people have them.
But you can have a tough childhood loving and being loved, and if you do it makes all the difference.
I’m a Dickens fan, but I never liked Angela’s Ashes. To me, it seemed like a piece of anti-Catholic bigotry. Which was why it was so popular among the NYTimes book reviwers and leftist intellectuals.
To quote from the text below the photo:
“Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood....”
Well, sorry, but that’s a load of horse manure. Having a drunken father is tough, but it doesn’t require you to join the liberal establishment and curse the Irish and the Catholic Church.
Ping!
I knew Angela; did Frank McCourt? - Angela McCourt, mother of author Frank McCourt http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1252/is_n19_v124/ai_20227028/?tag=content;col1
There once was an author from limerick...
...For many years, McCourt tried and failed to write about his childhood. ...The psychological weight of his past may have weighed him down. It also took a toll on his personal life; first one, then a second marriage ended in divorce. (He was married a third time, happily and permanently, in 1994. He left the Catholic Church too, and the split was not amicable. "I was so angry for so long, I could hardly have a conversation without getting into an argument," he said. "It was only when I felt I could finally distance myself from my past that I began to write about what happened."[emphasis mine]
...Angela's Ashes... appeared in 1996, when McCourt was 66. The book told the story of his early years in a voice purged of anger and bitterness and self-pity. In an extraordinary act of forgiveness, he wrote about his father with humor and even compassion. ... "My dream was to have a Library of Congress catalog number, that's all," McCourt said. But it became first a critical sensation, then a runaway best seller....McCourt won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize....
...Fame and fortune transformed McCourt's last years. He bought a second home in Connecticut, next door to Arthur Miller. There is now an Angela's Ashes walking tour in Limerick, and the university there awarded him a doctorate. He spent three months as a writer-in-residence in London, at the Savoy Hotel, and another term at the American Academy in Rome (during that time, he met Pope John Paul II and rather embarrassedly knelt and kissed his ring).... [emphasis mine]
Toronto Star: Frank McCourt had wisdom to look back
"Author had a love-hate relationship with Ireland after...his toxic...childhood..."
Mitch Albom: A Tribute to Frank McCourt
Author Albom played in a band with McCourt in New York
When Irish Tongues Are Talking
March 27, 2007: Slate asked a group of memoir writers, including McCourt: How do you choose to alert people who appear in your books that you are writing about them? His reply;
...Most of the people in Ashes were dead (still are)...though I once—only once—mentioned what I was writing to my brother, Malachy. When the book was published in Ireland, I was denounced from hill, pulpit, and barstool. Certain citizens claimed I had disgraced the fair name of the city of Limerick, that I had attacked the church, that I had despoiled my mother's name, and that if I returned to Limerick, I would surely be found hanging from a lamppost....'Tis was trickier. My publisher had me change certain names and alter certain scenes for fear of offending the sensibilities of teaching colleagues... I also had to be careful about comments on my first marriage. There be dragons.