Farewell, Frank, and thanks for the wonderful books.
I will be raising a glass this evening…
“So fill to me the parting glass
And drink a health whate’er befalls
Then gently rise and softly call
Goodnight and joy be to you all!”
Thanks, Frankie. Rest in peace.
It’s sad.
'Tis.
Don’t do that to me!
I thought you were referring to the LA Dodgers owner.
Same here Silenus. My heart skipped a beat for a moment there. Phew!!!
Oh no! A dream of mine for several years now has been to meet him!
I reviewed 'Tis for the Lexington Herald-Leader when it was released and it was my secret hope that he actually read my words about his words. At the minimum, I had hoped to meet him at a reading, get his autograph and somehow frame the whole shebang with a photo of he and I.
Angela’s Ashes is a unique piece of literature. I’m so sad to hear of his death.
This is funny, given what I just posted:
sniff
RIP
Very sad. I was fascinated by Angela’s Ashes.
Listening to him read Teacher Man was awesome. We listened to several parts of it in various of my Education classes, and again have listened to some of it since I’ve become a teacher, for inspiration and learning.
The bit about the sandwich that he simply takes and eats is just priceless.
I remember reading Angela’s Ashes on a road trip from SC to St. Louis after visiting my in-laws. I crouched in a motel bathroom reading after everyone went to bed into the wee hours of the night.
When I turned to the last page, and read that last word, I burst into tears and sobbed.
RIP Frank.
Frank and his brother Malachy occasionally toured in a show about their childhood called “A Couple of Blaguards”. There are several video clipsfrom it on the show’s website; if you enjoyed his books they’re worth watching.
I read and enjoyed the book and Tis (haven’t read the third one), but I had no idea how controversial Angela’s Ashes was. Many people, almost none of whom actually knew the McCourt family swore it was a pack of lies or worse and that it savagely maligned Limerick. (I thought it savagely maligned drunk fathers and poverty personally- the city itself I thought, other than the Irish Catholic dominance which is hardly a McCourtism, was generally a neutral value.)
I also didn’t realize that the McCourt brothers and Richard Harris (a fellow Limerick native) hated each other so much. Harris absolutely went feral in his attack on the book and the movie and the McCourt brothers’ nerve in suggesting he was from a much better to do family. (Pick a cite.)
One of Harris’s criticisms is he thought Frank and Malachy mistreated (or more properly, neglected) their mother and had little or no love for her. Personally I wouldn’t blame them; when I read the book I didn’t like Angela much more than I did her deadbeat drunk of a husband. While I realize opportunities for women were, to say the least, limited at the time, I thought she was little less sorry than he was and for continuing to have babies with a penniless drunk when they were as low as they could be without living in an alley. (So your husband won’t work? Get your own ass to England and get a defense industry job, they most certainly hired women! Leave the kids with a relative or a neighbor and send them money, they’ll likely be glad to do it.)
One of the more ridiculous, and of interest to me as someone who writes about his relatives, is this one: I knew Angela; did Frank McCourt?, an article by somebody who summises that McCourt was lying because when she knew Angela (as an old woman in NYC) she was nothing like Frank’s depiction in the book. I think this one stands on high ground in both stupidity and arrogance to assume that you know a casual acquaintance, or even a more-than-casual one, as well as their children did. Nobody who has lived with you for years will ever see you the same as somebody who hasn’t, plus the fact that this woman didn’t know Angela when she had 4 children to care for and no money and was miserably depressed in the slums of Ireland. (Obviously I have no idea of the memoir’s truth value, but neither does this doofette.)
In any case, RIP to a good writer.
You mean there are two people by that name? I just thought he had done well enough from the sale of his books that he could afford to buy a ball club.
I have always loved Angela’s Ashes…one of my favorite books ever!!!
A good book, Angela’s Ashes. RIP, Frank.
It’s been a long time since I read the book, but I remember having quite a bit of ambivalence towards Angela as well. I think she did the best she could under her time and circumstances. When you think about the fact that she lost three children AND was abandoned by her husband, it’s absolutely horrendous. Today she would have been diagnosed with depression and might have received some help, but none of those resources were available to her then. And as for continuing to have babies…well, that’s hardly all her fault. There wasn’t a whole lot of birth control options then for any women, much less Catholic women in Ireland.
I can’t remember, did Frank and his brothers ever see their father again before he died?
I don’t know about his brothers, but Frank mentions going to see him in Tis. He was living with his [birth] family in Northern Ireland and per Frank they believed that he had left Angela because she was unfaithful to him with Laman Griffin (the cousin she moved in with after being evicted). Since her affair with Laman (which I couldn’t tell from the book whether it was consentual, or was it an ‘I’ll sleep with you if you don’t evict my sons’ or was it consentual [they were only distant cousins and she was lonely] or a combination) came years after Malachy Sr. left I’m not sure how he knew about it. Frank seems to have kept his contempt in check during the visit but had no use for his father afterwards. (He lived until 1985, surviving Angela by four years.)
Frank also mentions in Tis how both he and Malachy Jr. allotted their spousal allowance to her when they joined the service so she’d actually lived more comfortably than she ever had before. Later Angela came for a visit to Brooklyn to see him and Malachy, Jr., but when the visit was over didn’t/wouldn’t go home. Since she had no means of support and her sons weren’t well off financially it was a burden.
Regarding birth control, one scene from Ashes I remember is when the Protestant newspaper Frank delivered had an article about birth control. He and the other paper boys had to go through Limerick tearing out that page of every copy they’d delivered on orders from the civil authorities, but the publisher advised them to keep the pages and sell them. Frank said he earned 9 pounds selling those articles.