When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I survived at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhhood: 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 terrible things they did to us for eight hundred long years.
Above all - we were wet.
I love this book. Apparently other people did as well; it won the Pulitzer Prize. In lesser hands, this book had the potential to be extremely depressing. But Frank McCourt brings humor, love, compassion and dignity to his memoir.
Note: I realize this is a most ironic post, given my rant about depressing modern literature above. This is not a beach read. And yes, it can get depressing. But through the book I held on to the fact that Frank McCourt obviously came out of it all okay, otherwise he wouldn't have written the book. I was fascinated by his will to survive, and even thrive, despite his upbringing. And how his soul was sustained by the stories of his father, when everything else seemed to be conspiring to snuff it out.
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