Frank McCourt

I think the storytellers are the toughest ones to lose.

“When I look back on my childhood, I wonder how I survived at all,” the book’s second paragraph begins in a famous passage. “It was, of course, a miserable childhood: The happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.

“People everywhere brag and whimper about the woes of their early years, but nothing can compare with the Irish version: the poverty; the shiftless loquacious alcoholic father; the pious defeated mother moaning by the fire; pompous priests; bullying schoolmasters; the English and all the terrible things they did to us for 800 long years.”

I read Angela's Ashes while in the hospital for a collapsed lung in 1996, tethered to an oxygen machine and miserable. The grim little book kept me laughing in spite of it, because not only is there nothing worse than an Irish Catholic childhood, there are no funnier recounters of a miserable childhood than the Irish Catholics who survived them.