A couple of weeks ago I finally read Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt.
It turns out Angela didn’t have any ashes.
Sadly, McCourt died earlier this summer. It was in the news. Only thirteen years earlier, Angela’s Ashes had rocketed out of nowhere as a memoir without a particularly focused plotline, much less sympathetic characters, much less what is known in normal circles as HOPE.
It’s the language. It’s well-written. McCourt was a high school English teacher.
However, it’s also the genre and what it says to those of us literate readers of the industrialized world: there is suffering in the world. And, like McCourt, a middle-class educated American for almost sixty years, we do understand suffering.
Now more than ever. . .
Read the full essay on Pulp Rag.