R.I.P. Frank McCourt

"Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood."

Frank McCourt wrote this in the second paragraph of his award-winning bestselling memoir, Angela's Ashes - a chronicle of his impoverished childhood in Limerick, Ireland.  McCourt died this weekend from cancer; he was 78.

I read Angela's Ashes and loved it.  I was in my 20s, living comfortably in NYC, pursuing a Master's degree and after that, working full-time.  Life was good and plentiful.

But there was something about Angela's Ashes, cultural, I suppose, to which I could strongly relate, and my mom felt the same.  It was odd, we thought, how much a story about extreme poverty in Ireland in the 1930s and 1940s could resonate with our own Irish-Catholic experiences in Boston.

Such poverty, or even a slightly less desperate, modern American version, I'd barely felt it growing up, but seen my cousins struggle with it in Boston, and knew my parents had experienced it as well.  Again, not to the depths that McCourt described, but the alcoholism; the cold, condemning shoulder of the Church even as it fed and clothed families; the concept of living "on the dole" as my father still quips today whenever my material needs become parasitic - all of these I know from experience or family history, passed down through the generations.  And of course, what continues through my generation: tough exteriors and a distrust of emotionalism, the joking and heckling to get through tough times.

“I think there’s something about the Irish experience — that we had to have a sense of humor or die,” Mr. McCourt once told an interviewer. “That’s what kept us going — a sense of absurdity, rather than humor.

Yep.  Rest in Peace, Frank, and may you have them in empathetic stitches wherever you're headed.

More on McCourt here, here, and here.

(Photo of Frank McCourt by David Shankbone)