Angela’s Ashes

Angela’s Ashes is about the author’s poverty stricken childhood and how he survived it. Frank McCourt vividly illustrates the impoverished streets of Limerick, Ireland, where he spent his childhood in ragged boots and carrying a pig’s head for Christmas dinner. Although this autobiography is famous as the award-winning autobiography, many readers would not be able to help growing bored at the repetitive description of poverty and hardships that the author had to face.

            McCourt’s childhood in Ireland is infected with poverty, an alcoholic father, and deaths of his siblings. His father, Malachy, was involved in IRA and he is a fierce patriot of Ireland. He is a helpless alcoholic, the incompetent head of the family who spends his wage in a pub instead of bringing it home to feed his children. He cannot hold a same job for more than two weeks and often ends up sleeping in public places on Friday nights. Whenever he is drunk, he commands his children to die for Ireland since it is a great honor to sacrifice one’s life for his country. Their house is always wet and filthy, their clothes are tattered, the children collect coals on streets to warm the house, and they steal food to feed themselves.

            Because of poverty and drunken father, all they can afford to eat on Christmas is a pig’s head. The author writes:

Mam says she has a pain in her back, that I’ll have to carry the pig’s head. I hold it against my chest but it’s damp and when the newspaper begins to fall away everyone can see the head. Mam says, I’m ashamed of me life that the world should know we’re having pig’s head for Christmas. Boys from Leamy’s National School see me and they point and laugh. Aw, Gawd, look at Frankie McCourt and’ his pig’s snout. Is that what Yanks ate for Christmas dinner, Frankie?

This quote vividly illustrates the author’s misery at having to deal with his peers and enduring ridicules. Even though McCourt’s schoolmates are not financially well-off, they are able to afford a decent Christmas dinner. The father is too proud to carry the head through his neighborhood, making his oldest son carry it instead of him, and the mother is humiliated by her family’s pennilessness. This quote eloquently illustrates how desperate McCourt’s childhood was; unfortunately, the rest of his autobiography is filled with similar - almost needless - descriptions about the most insignificant events. He writes minimum of two pages for minor diseases he caught, and describes in detail how he had to have pig’s head for Christmas dinner once more few years later. His words start to sound like petty complaints and whining, which makes the readers weary and exhausted. The social oppression and endless poverty will also make many readers depressed and miserable just like the child Frank himself.

Despite the book’s reputation as a Pulitzer- Prize winner, McCourt’s memoir fails to be a page-turner. McCourt’s sentence structure does not necessarily follow the standard English grammar, which coerces the readers to adjust to his writing style. He does not use dialogues, but incorporates what people are saying into part of a sentence. The endless delineation about the challenges that had plagued him is at first gripping, yet becomes repetitive towards the end. The readers who enjoy rather fast-paced books will find this work to be an excellent replacement for sleeping pills.