Angela's Ashes

Frank McCourt

4 ideas

1. Father drinks the wages, Limerick

   In 1930s Limerick, Malachy McCourt repeatedly takes his dole or his first week's pay to the pub and comes home singing patriotic songs, waking his sons to promise they'll die for Ireland, while Angela begs at the St. Vincent de Paul Society for food. Three of the seven McCourt children die young, Margaret in Brooklyn and the twins Oliver and Eugene in Limerick, amid damp, a flooded ground floor the family calls 'Ireland' and a lavatory shared by the whole lane. The case shows a household where scarce work and meagre relief are made worse when the little money that does come in goes to drink before it reaches the family.

2. Child's-eye present tense invites reader judgment

   Much of the memoir is narrated in the present tense through a child who lacks adult categories, so many events are reported as he meets them rather than explained, and the reader is often left to supply the indignation. The child's literal, puzzled viewpoint also lets humor sit alongside misery, though the adult voice of the opening does assign blame, and the narration is not free of hindsight throughout.

3. Charming father and failing father coexist

   A parent can be simultaneously the source of a child's best moments and the cause of its deprivation. Sober in the mornings, the father tells stories and teaches his son to love language and Ireland; drunk at night, he steals the family's food money. The child's love doesn't resolve the contradiction but holds both, which is why the damage from such parents is harder to reject than plain cruelty.

4. Shame accompanies poverty in Catholic Limerick

   In the memoir's Limerick, poverty comes with humiliation as well as hunger: charity officials who interrogate supplicants, relatives who sneer, priests and schoolmasters who treat slum children harshly, and neighbors who notice who begs. The book shows the poor carrying this as guilt and secrecy, alongside the religious guilt the child absorbs.

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