Angela's Ashes
Frank McCourt, 1996
★ 4.16 from 672k ratings on Goodreads
A boy grows up poor in Limerick with an often-absent father and a mother who keeps the family alive, told with comic timing that makes squalor bearable. The voice is wry and conversational, moving through poverty, grief and small wonders at a steady, anecdotal pace.
Feels like wonder, melancholy and grief. About family, death and society.
Who it’s for
You may like it if you enjoy memoirs with a strong storytelling voice and humor mixed into hard family history. Be prepared for sustained bleakness, poverty and grief, and some readers find the narrator's tone whiny or manipulative.
Why read it
Read it for a clear-eyed account of a childhood shaped by poverty and an education that becomes a way out, told with humor and without self-pity.
A page from the book
What a teacher gives a boy whose shoes are already broken.
He says, you have to study and learn so that you can make up your own mind about history and everything else but you can’t make up an empty mind. Stock your mind, stock your mind. You might be poor, your shoes might be broken, but your mind is a palace. What readers say
Readers find the memoir deeply depressing and heartbreaking, yet many also laugh at its humor and admire its honesty and storytelling. Some are moved by hope and tenderness; others find it bleak, whiny, or manipulative.
Frank McCourt.Frank McCourt was born in Brooklyn in 1930, grew up in Limerick, and taught writing in New York City public schools for nearly thirty years before publishing Angela's Ashes at 66.
Books that feel like this
More by Frank McCourt
Teacher Man
Frank McCourt, 2005
A New York teacher's wry, profane memoir of thirty years in public-school classrooms, where the real subject is how to become a person.
Tis
Frank McCourt, 1996
A memoir of poverty, education, and Irish identity, written with a voice of biting wit and deep, unexpected tenderness.
Where to get it
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Questions readers ask
- Is Angela's Ashes for me?
- You may like it if you enjoy memoirs with a strong storytelling voice and humor mixed into hard family history. Be prepared for sustained bleakness, poverty and grief, and some readers find the narrator's tone whiny or manipulative.
- What is Angela's Ashes like?
- The voice is wry and conversational, moving through poverty, grief and small wonders at a steady, anecdotal pace. Feels like wonder, melancholy and grief. About family, death and society.
- What should I read after Angela's Ashes?
- If you liked Angela's Ashes, try Tuesdays with Morrie (Mitch Albom), Unbroken (Laura Hillenbrand) and John Adams (David McCullough).
A taste of the feed
A revolution begins in minds, long before the first shot.
As to the history of the revolution, my ideas may be peculiar, perhaps singular. What do we mean by the Revolution? The war? That was no part of the revolution; it was only an effect and consequence of it. The revolution was in the minds of the people, and this was effected from 1760–1775, in the course of fifteen years, before a drop of blood was shed at Lexington.
John Adams · David McCullough
A man writes a letter that is mostly a knife, and exactly correct about the sums.
Your income has always been ample, and you never ought to have borrowed any money, and Mary Towle did a great wrong in lending you any money. My opinion of you is the same as it always has been—that you are an extravagant, deceitful, dishonest, worthless person. You have squandered thousands of dollars and left your honest debts unpaid. But I do not think you are capable of comprehending the mistakes that you have made. Now that you are paying up Mary Towle, how would it do to pay the various other accounts that you owe?
Me · Katharine Hepburn
The cost of becoming conscious of your own gift.
His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly’s wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred. Later he became conscious of his damaged wings and of their construction and he learned to think and could not fly any more because the love of flight was gone and he could only remember when it had been effortless.
A Moveable Feast · Ernest Hemingway
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