Frank McCourt

"A happy childhood does you no good," a ponderable from the memoir Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt, who died yesterday of metastatic melanoma, age 78.

I read Angela's Ashes in the mid 90s, after it won the Pulitzer Prize. Almost everyone I knew read it. I heard interviews with Frank McCourt. I liked him. I liked his Irish brogue, and I liked the things he said. He taught high school English many years, thirty or more, then at age 60 wrote that memoir. He said all literature is nothing more nor less than a story.

The book? Good writing but hard reading, very depressing and relentlessly so. No happy childhood for him and no happy motherhood for his mother. Three of her five children died as children. And that's only the beginning. His father? A loquacious drunk, like so many other Irish men, who drank up and probably "puked up his week's salary" in the street outside the pub.

And yet, I recommend the book. It's a should read.

I didn't read his other two memoirs. 'Tis, about his life after coming to New York, or Teacher Man, about his life as a teacher in New York City. But now maybe I will read Teacher Man, if I'm tough enough to do it.