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Much Ado About Publishing

Feeding Frank McCourt

by Nina L. Diamond

Throughout the 1930s and '40s, little Frankie was starving.

It was a good day if he got some fried bread and weak tea. He licked the paper that had been wrapped around somebody else's chips (french fries to we Yanks) -- that was a real treat. Maybe a few times a year he'd get some meat, precious, tiny bits he picked out of a bunch of bones.

This drove me crazy.

While reading Angela's Ashes, Frank McCourt's Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir of his poor, but vibrant, Irish childhood, I kept thinking, "I have to feed this little boy." No matter that when the book was published in 1996 this "little boy" was now a well-fed man in his 60s, I was still determined to feed Frank McCourt.

To me, and the rest of his millions of readers, he would always be that curious, witty, and hungry little boy.

Feeding Frank McCourt would go something like this: I would interview him over lunch or dinner, and we'd sit in a restaurant at a table filled with all the comfort food he would've chosen as a child. Maybe roast beef and mashed potatoes...or was he tired of potatoes? Well, whatever Frank McCourt wanted to eat, I'd see to it that he got it. Oh, yes, and chicken soup, too. You gotta feed a starving child chicken soup.

Dessert would be whatever cakes and goodies he wanted. And then a nice, hot cup of coffee because he was a grown-up now.

Yes, I had it all planned out. I could even see that big smile on his mischevious face with the twinkling eyes. The smile as he leaned back and sighed that sigh of someone who's just eaten way too much. He'd be surrounded by empty plates. Lots of them. Hell, he might even discreetly burp.

Unfortunately, things did not go as planned.

That's because when I interviewed Frank McCourt, it was on the phone. He was in the middle of the book tour for Teacher Man, the third installment of his memoir series ('Tis was the second), and at his hotel in Denver, Colorado and I was in Austin, Texas.

Oh, rats.

Well, if I wasn't going to feed Frank McCourt (at least not at this interview, but I hold out hope for an in-person one in the future, complete with feast), we were at least going to begin our conversation talking about food.

"The whole time I was reading Angela's Ashes, all I wanted to do was feed you," I told him. "So, tell me what you had for lunch today."

He laughed.

"A little piece of chicken. Three little strips of chicken on top of a patty of some kind made from potatoes, and a tiny piece of salad," he said in his light Irish accent.

What? That's all? I wanted to hear that he'd really chowed down.

"I have a fairly poor relationship with food," he admitted. "Poor in the sense that I'm not crazy about it."

Frank McCourt's not crazy about food? The fantasies of millions of readers had just gone down the garbage disposal in the kitchen sink.

"You didn't end up a big eater to make up for what you didn't eat as a child?" I asked.

"No," he said. "It's very funny. There are four brothers. Two became big eaters. Alphie is the youngest and I'm the oldest, and we both became spare eaters."

I wondered about other peoples' reactions to feeding Frank McCourt.

"Have people at booksignings told you that while they read the book they wanted to feed you?"

"Yeah!" he laughed. "(They've said) I wanted to take you home, and I wanted to warm you up, and feed you, feed you, especially feed you."

Oh good, I think. It wasn't just me.

That's the power of an exceptionally well-written memoir: It makes you want to warm and feed the hungry little boy you forgot is now a not starving grown man.

Frank McCourt wrote Angela's Ashes in the voice of a child and a teenager, not the voice of a sixtysomething man looking back on his youth. He says that he found that the trick to doing that was in telling his story "objectively, almost as if you pull the camera back and no judgements are made."

As a child, he loved to read, and he honed his storytelling skills by spending years as a teacher in the classrooms of New York, trying to tame unruly kids who weren't always eager to hear the day's lesson. Hearing his Irish accent, however, they asked him about his childhood in Ireland. So, he'd tell them stories, lots of stories.

As a young teacher, Frank McCourt's memories were still so fresh, and telling those stories over and over for 30 years kept them that way. When he began to make notes and write Angela's Ashes, "from teaching, and my years and years of yakking at the kids," he says his narrative and dialogue came alive. He hadn't realized it, but he'd been preparing to write his memoir for three decades. "I was talking to them, but I was really talking to myself."

He retired from teaching high school in 1987, and finally had the time to write.

"I wanted to write, and more and more I wanted to write a memoir about growing up in Ireland because of the way the kids were asking me about it and seemed to be interested," he says. "They used to look shocked and astonished about life in a Limerick lane. The one thing I wanted to do was to write that book. I didn't know I'd write the other two. The feeling of satisfaction was immense. That's what's going to be on the bookshelves for my family and my former students. I suppose I wanted to show the details of poverty, the effect all of it has on any human being, the dangers of it, the starvation. That engenders rage, so watch out."

Fortunately, rage wasn't one of the effects poverty had on Frank McCourt.

"It takes you years to crawl out of that childhood," he says, "and from the Catholic upbringing," which was oppressive in Ireland at the time.

Eventually, McCourt said to himself, "Now, I'm going to cast it aside and free myself."

He says, "You're lucky if you can free yourself from it. A lot of people don't. They stay victims for the rest of their lives."

How did Frank McCourt break free?

"Teaching. The classroom," he says. "I didn't want to be miserable anymore, (so I) cast off the misery."

Talking about it in class helped him a lot.

"Like most of the Irish of my generation, we were an uptight bunch. I had to work my way out of that," he says. "I didn't know anything, I didn't know how to teach or how to communicate. I didn't know what to communicate until they started asking me those questions, and then I started telling them those stories. I wrote in Teacher Man that my life saved my life."

By telling his stories, in a way Frank McCourt was working on Angela's Ashes for his entire teaching career. Gradually, he turned to the page.

"I started taking notes," he says. "Making lists of streets, shops, churches, teachers, priests, and food. That was a very short list: tea, bread, turnips, and potatoes. Someone asked me at a booksigning, 'How do you make fried bread?' I just said, 'You fry it.' As I talk now, my mouth is watering for a piece of fried bread. The great irony is that now I'm wheat intolerant so I can't have the fried bread, or Guinness, so my life is over. This started about two years ago, so now I can only have fine wine."

In Angela's Ashes, we see how the family is in such dire straits because little Frankie's father is an alcoholic who also drinks away his paycheck on those rare occasions when he can actually keep a job. The family survives most of the time "on the dole," a form of welfare that barely allows them to afford a small, cold, usually flooded, dilapidated apartment of sorts that would make a crack house look like Buckingham Palace.

So, I ask Frank McCourt if, like his father, he became too fond of "the drink."

"My problem was that I had no capacity for it," he laughs. "I didn't want to suffer and waste my time. I realized that if you have to get up in the morning and face kids, you better be sober and strong. Going in with a hangover was pure hell, so I stopped that little habit."

In late 2005, just a few months before we spoke, McCourt returned to Ireland for a visit.

"It's booming. It's not the Ireland I lived in," he says. "The church has lost its power completely. We grew up in a state of terror."

McCourt views his spiritual life now as "a buffet," he says. "All the religions are laid out there and now I take what I want from each one. I think if I went into a religion it would be Buddhism. They won't even kill a cockroach."

Married, with a grown daughter and three grandchildren, McCourt turned 76 this past August, and says he's not sure what his next book will be, but he knows the themes he'd like to explore.

"I'd really like to write about women, the last great mystery," he says. "I think men are fairly superficial."

He'd also like to share his insights on children.

"I think I've learned a lot and I have some ideas about families and kids, and the sad state of families where people expect so much of their kids," he says. "I'd like to break the rhythm of American life. I think some people after high school should knock around for four years, have some adventure and life experience, and then go to college. Then they'd understand the literature more. In the Second World War, when people were drafted, they knew more when they got back. Then they went to college."

In Angela's Ashes, 'Tis, and now Teacher Man, Frank McCourt shared his painful, poignant, and often hilarious experiences with readers who wanted to feed the little boy who tried to make sense out of his difficult world, and cheer on the man who inventively made his way through three decades as a teacher.

I still want to feed Frank McCourt.

But, I also want to say thank you, Frank, for feeding all of us.

* * * * *

Nina L. Diamond is a journalist, essayist, and the author of Voices of Truth: Conversations with Scientists, Thinkers & Healers. Her work has appeared in numerous publications, including Omni, The Los Angeles Times Magazine, The Chicago Tribune, and The Miami Herald.

Ms. Diamond was a writer and performer on Pandemonium, the National Public Radio (NPR) satirical humor program, for its entire run in Miami and select markets nationwide from 1984-1998. As an editor, she works frequently with other authors and journalists on both fiction and non-fiction.

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