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Angela's Ashes  Story Behind the Book
ANGELA'S ASHES, the memoir of Frank McCourt's early years in Limerick, Ireland, won the 1997 Pulitzer Prize and has quickly become an international literary phenomenon. One of the bestselling memoirs ever published, it has been on the New York Times Book Review bestseller list since 1996.
Frank's mother, Angela, has no money to feed the children since Frank's father, Malachy, rarely works, and when he does he drinks his wages. Yet Malachy, exasperating, irresponsible, and beguiling does nurture in Frank an appetite for the one thing: storytelling.
Perhaps it is this passion for storytelling that accounts for Frank's survival. Wearing rags for nappies, begging a pig's head for Christmas dinner, and gathering coal from the roadside to light a fire, Frank endures poverty, near-starvation, and the casual cruelty of relatives and neighbors, yet lives to tell his tale with eloquence, exuberance, and remarkable forgiveness.
McCourt returned to New York City at the age of 19, where he worked as a high school English teacher for most of the next 45 years. During his 20s, Frank knew he wanted to write but held off on writing about the story of his childhood for so long, as he didn't feel the story was sufficiently interesting, and such were his insecurities that he felt no one would want to read about it. However, during this time he began making notes about various aspects of his childhood.
McCourt was finally inspired by a writing project he had assigned to his class. He decided upon the title ANGELA'S ASHES, as the book was going to end with the death of his mother, Angela, in 1981, and the subsequent scattering of her ashes in Limerick over the family graveyard. The publishers subsequently decided there was enough "meat" in his life just up to the age of 19 for the book.
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"Throughout the filming, Frank's book was our bible. If anyone had a question, be it casting, art department, camera, locations, editing or whatever, I always had the same answer: 'Just read the book -- all the clues are there.'" --Alan Parker
