Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt

This is an astonishing memoir of growing up in Catholic Ireland. I read this at about age 12 and loved it all through high school and decided it had been a good couple of years since I had read it so read it again.

The novel starts off with a four year old Frankie in the USA, and he tells the story of his very young years. His mother comes to the USA for a new life, before meeting Frank's father Malachy and Frank is born only a few months after his parents' marriage rendering him a bastard. The family moves to Ireland when Frank's little sister dies as just a baby. They travel through Dublin, visiting Malachy's family and end up in Limerick. The next part of the story chronicles growing up with an alcoholic father and surviving with not enough money for food and relying on grants from various Christian foundations and 'the dole' as well as living assistance where possible and IOUs from the grocery store down the road. The thing that makes this memoir so heartbreaking is that it is written from the perspective of his young self. Frankie tries to model himself on the masculine figure his father never was and is constantly under the watchful eye of his Catholic God and spends a lot of time in confession. He finds himself rejected from local high schools because of the family's low social status, rejected from being an altar boy despite knowing the Latin phrases back to front. His family are at constant threat from "the typhoid", "the galloping consumption" and other illnesses which are not made less likely when the family moves next to a sole lavatory in a street where sewage is emptied from the other houses in the lane daily.

The book continues as Frankie struggles as a 13 year-old to make a life for himself, with the over and above goal of leaving Ireland for the USA, he makes his living firstly as a telegram boy and then as a magazine deliverer. An especially amusing part of the book is when one of the magazines they deliver accidentally has a page advertising contraception, Frankie is made to rip out the pages of the magazines where they have been delivered, not having a clue what contraception is and sells these scandalous pages for a profit.

The Irish lilt is noticed throughout and this is something that draws the reader even more into Frankie's life and his dedication to becoming something different than his upbringing would have him believe. His father's Dublin accent is scorned throughout by the other families in the area. McCourt truly had (he died recently) a great gift for writing and for displaying events as they happened in his mind at the time which is something a lot of memoirs struggle with. This remains on my list of favourite books. I highly recommend it.