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A Memoir
Scribner
June 1999
On Sale: May 25, 1999
368 pages ISBN: 068484267X EAN: 9780684842677 Paperback (reprint)
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Non-Fiction Memoir
"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 does nurture in Frank an appetite for the
one thing he can provide: a story. Perhaps it is a story that accounts for Frank's survival.
Wearing shoes repaired with tires, begging a pig's head for
Christmas dinner, and searching the pubs for his father,
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.
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