Week Five: Fluid Memories

Fluidity has an important role when it comes to memoirs. How can someone write a book about themselves and make it interesting? It takes craftsmanship to design such a story. Memories are fragments. Yet, the writer finds a way to describe them vividly (or not so much) to the reader’s amusement. There are multiple decisions needed to be made when picking these precise memories. What should be omitted is as important as what should be in. The writer needs to be selective in order to not drown the reader with their life story.

My favorite memoir would be Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt. Along with two other memoirs, McCourt gives an unflinching account of his life from the slums of New York to the slums of Limerick and back to the United States. Of the three, Angela’s Ashes is the most compelling. Frank is the eldest offspring of an unfortunate “knee-trembler” between two Irish immigrants in 1930. His mother Angela has aunts in New York that force a “shotgun” wedding that leads to six siblings, abject poverty, tragedy, and ultimately hope and redemption. It’s tragic that Angela moves to New York to escape Ireland only to become its prisoner through her pregnancy and unhappy marriage to Malachy McCourt.

After a sister and twin brothers pass away, the family moves back to Limerick where there’s hope for a better life among family and friends. Circumstances never really improve. Frank’s alcoholic father Malachy leaves for England and employment. After one or two paychecks are sent Malachy is never seen or heard from again. Frank is bright and literate. He ends up supplementing his income writing scathing collection letters for a money lender. One day he finds the women dead and alone. He destroys her ledgers and helps himself to her fortune. He uses the money to emigrate back to America.

Despite some truly terrible moments such as the death of his sister Margaret and brothers Eugene and Oliver, the memoir is not without great humor and tenderness. The cathartic moment for me is when Frank recalls mornings alone with his dad. Frank would sit listening to his father tells wonderful stories, whether from Irish folklore or his dad’s own fertile imagination. Malachy Sr. didn’t amount to much, but he fueled in his son a gift for language and the freedom it provides.

Young Frank is blessed by school headmaster Hoppy O’Halloran who exhorts:

 … 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.

Somehow Frank perseveres, always buoyed by this advice and a love for literature and storytelling. He discovers the classics, and feels Shakespeare is “like having jewels in [his] mouth” when he quotes the words.

For me the power and beauty of the narrative wouldn’t be less if I found he embellished. Angela’s Ashes isn’t a history book as much as a recollection of a lifetime of experiences both powerful and mundane. I’ve since read Frank’s brother Malachy disputed some of Frank’s story. The truth has many sides and is dependent on your perspective. Frank’s life was shaped by the events, impressions and emotions he retells as he recalls them happening. That’s good enough for me.

I think Angela’s Ashes would translate perfectly into a blog. McCourt’s stories and anecdotes are offered in bite-size pieces usually prefaced with separators clearly staging the next memory. He cleverly begins many chapters like Chapter Eight, “I’m ten years old and ready to go to St. Joseph’s Church for my Confirmation.” Through this mechanism he could do an endless number of blog posts easy to digest as separate narratives.

Link to Angela's Ashes, Google Books