5 Irish American St. Patrick’s Day Reads for the Irish at Heart

Leave Me Alone, I’m Reading: Finding and Losing Myself in Books, by Maureen Corrigan
NPR’s Fresh Air book critic Maureen Corrigan’s engaging account of how she became so book besotted includes vivid details of her Irish Catholic upbringing in Queens. In the chapter “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition: What Catholic Martyr Stories Taught Me about Getting to Heaven—and Getting Even,” she reflects on formative reading in the Irish American canon, such as Pete Hamill’s A Drinking Life and the Beany Malone children’s book series. She writes, “The martyr stories we learned in religion class most blatantly preached the spiritual rewards of ‘sucking it up.'”

Teacher Man, by Frank McCourt
Most readers know Frank McCourt for his debut, Pulitzer Prize–winning memoir Angela’s Ashes, about growing up impoverished in Ireland, published when he was 66. His 2005 memoir, Teacher Man, about the 30 years McCourt spent teaching English in New York City public schools, explains why it took him so long to write that first book: “When you teach five high school classes a day, five days a week, you’re not inclined to go home to clear your head and fashion deathless prose.”

After This, by Alice McDermott
Alice McDermott’s elegant fiction makes her one of the top chroniclers of the Irish American Catholic family. Try Charming Billy, her 1998 National Book Award winner, about a charismatic alcoholic, or After This, her crisp, poignant evocation of an Irish Catholic family braving cultural changes in the second half of the 20th century.

Both Ways is The Only Way I Want It by Maile Meloy
“Travis, B.,” one of the strongest stories in Maile Meloy’s most recent short story collection, Both Ways is The Only Way I Want It, is about Chet Moran, a part-Irish, part-Cheyenne ranch hand, crippled by polio, who develops a crush on a lawyer named Beth. It’s impossible not to root for the shy Chet, who “walked as though he were turning to himself to ask a question.”

The Tender Bar by J.R. Moehringer
When J.R. Moehringer was growing up in Manhasset, New York, you were either “Gaelic or garlic,” according to his classmate, so Moehringer didn’t admit he had both Irish and Italian ancestors. In this endearing memoir, the fatherless Moehringer finds camaraderie in the people who populate Publicans, a bar where his Uncle Charlie works the taps, located just 142 steps from his grandfather’s house. Moehringer recalls the first time he saw the bar’s regulars playing softball “on a hot summer night in 1972,” when he was seven years old. He asked his mother, “‘Why do those men act so silly?’
‘They’re just—happy.’
‘About what?’
She looked at the men, thinking. ‘Beer, sweetheart. They’re happy about beer.'”
Who’s your favorite Irish—or Irish-American—author?