http://www.cnn.com/2009/SHOWBIZ/books/07/19/author.frank.mccourt.dead/index.html
RIP
Angela’s Ashes was an excellent, if incredibly bleak, book. 'Tis was great as well, especially after reading his brother Malachy’s account of their life in New York.
I hope he’s also remembered fondly by all his former pupils from 30 years of teaching, not just as an author in his later life.
I wish to post an RIP too. I read his book and concluded that he might have had the worst Western-world childhood (not counting prison camps and outright molesting and stuff) I ever heard of. I kept marveling that he lived to relate it. And that really, all he had to do was tell it and like gawkers at a wreck, we all slowed down to take it in. It very much made me think of the different things that happen with autobiographers; some people have incredible stuff happen to them, and they journalistically relate it and that’s enough. Others are gifted writers and elevate their experiences, relate them and that’s entertaining as well. He fit somewhere in between…
Hopin’ for some sweet place for that man to go.
There are awful childhoods that you can’t write about.
A lot of bad childhoods aren’t worth writing down.
It’s just bad little people doing nasty things to children who
either survive or do not. It isn’t interesting. You need at least some
people who are struggling to cope under bad circumstances,
who have some dignity, despite their flaws. Also it helps
to have a culture/religion that in some way, if only at the 11th
hour, supports you; and relatives who, despite their meanness
and inadequacies, do the same. McCourt had all that
and it’s part of what made his story worth telling. He writes
that the most miserable bad childhood is the miserable
Irish Catholic childhood. But reading his book, I think
he was lucky to be Irish and Catholic. It certainly
could have been worse.
Hemingway, in a very short story, The Doctor and The Doctor’s Wife,
captured a child, himself, whose parents live in a fatal marriage.
He said the best preparation for being a writer was a bad
childhood.
I think the best novel ever about childhood was
Henry Roth’s Call it Sleep.
I thought McCourt wrote beautifully. Well done.
I am so, so sorry he is gone-my absolute favorite writer. What a life, what a writer…
I hope he is pleasantly surprised right now.
The fan site on facebook has posts from his former students. What a lucky bunch they were.
May well be. That’s one I’ve meant to get back to since my first pass in college, some thirty-five years ago, I guess. Thanks for the nudge.
Still, I think ‘Angela’s Ashes’ is a classic that will endure for as long as the written word — decades, quite possibly.