“When I look back on my childhood, I wonder how I survived 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.
“People everywhere brag and whimper about the woes of their early years, but nothing can compare with the Irish version: the poverty; the shiftless loquacious alcoholic father; the pious defeated mother moaning by the fire; pompous priests; bullying schoolmasters; the English and all the terrible things they did to us for 800 long years.”
Those words are on the first page of Angela’s Ashes, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Frank McCourt, who died today at age 78. When I read those words I was galvanized and knew that the pages to follow would be mesmerizing. And they were.
Were I to pick out one sentence from that passage, it would be “The happy childhood is hardly worth your while.” Is that true? I’d say yes, in essense. I don’t think it means you must have a miserable childhood, but certainly, without adversity somewhere along the line, whether internal or external, you could hardly become an adult.
McCourt, and thousands just like him, qualified in the miserable childhood category. But he had the gift to write about it in a way that brought it alive. I could feel myself in the lanes, dealing with a certain class of people, and I could feel hunger. His subsequent two books did not have the same impact, but his brilliance burned so brightly in Angela’s Ashes, that we really didn’t need any more.
Rest in peace, Mr. McCourt. You’ve earned it. And thanks for opening up your childhood and life to us so we could better understand our own lives.
