Kitchen Privileges

Angela’s Ashes comes home to the Bronx in Mary Higgins Clark’s brilliant, touching, charming, and bittersweet memoir of a childhood during the Depression.

Mary Higgins Clark’s memoir begins with the death of her father in 1939. With no money in the house—the Higgins Bar and Grill in the Bronx is failing and in debt, and worry about it is one of the things that has killed her father—Mary’s indomitable Irish mother (she devotes a chapter to her “Wild Irish Mother”) puts out a classified ad: “...