Frank McCourt, best known for the bestselling memoir "Angela's Ashes," about his miserable Irish childhood, has died at 78. If there has been a more engagingly written memoir I don't know what it is. It won the Pulitzer Prize and several other writing awards.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/20/books/20mccourt.html?_r=1&ref=obituaries “When I look back on my childhood, I wonder how I survived at all,” the book’s second paragraph begins in a famous passage. “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.
“People everywhere brag and whimper about the woes of their early years, but nothing can compare with the Irish version: the poverty; the shiftless loquacious alcoholic father; the pious defeated mother moaning by the fire; pompous priests; bullying schoolmasters; the English and all the terrible things they did to us for 800 long years.”Another excerpt:
"Out in the Atlantic Ocean great sheets of rain gathered to drift slowly up the River Shannon and settle forever in Limerick. The rain dampened the city from the Feast of the Circumcision to the New Year's Eve. It created a cacophony of hacking coughs, bronchial rattles, asthmatic wheezes,consumptive croaks. It turned noses into fountains, lungs into bacterial sponges. It provoked cures galore; to ease the catarrh you boiled onions in milk blackened with pepper; for the congested passages you made a paste of boiled flour and nettles, wrapped it in a rag, and slapped it, sizzling, on the chest. From October to April the walls of Limerick glistened with the damp. Clothes never dried; tweed and woolen coats housed living things, sometimes sprouted mysterious vegetations ... The rain drove us into the church -- our refuge, our strength, our only dry place. At Mass, Benediction, novenas, we huddled in great damp clumps, dozing through priest drone, while steam rose again from our clothes to mingle with the sweetness of incense, flowers and candles. Limerick gained a reputation for piety, but we knew it was only the rain."I have a CD set of McCourt reading his own book in his unfaded Irish lilt. Well worth seeking out at the library.
