Angela's Ashes

Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt

English:

When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I managed to survive at all. 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."
So begins the luminous memoir of Frank McCourt, born in Depression-era Brooklyn to recent Irish immigrants and raised in the slums of Limerick, Ireland. 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 does nurture in Frank an appetite for the one thing he can provide: a story.
Perhaps it is a story that accounts for Frank's survival. Wearing shoes repaired with tires, begging a pig's head for Christmas dinner, and searching the pubs for his father, 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.
Simon & Schuster

Angela's Ashes (1999): Emily Watson, Robert Carlyle, Joe Breen, Ciaran Owens, Michael Legge - PopMatters Film Review

The Poetry of Poverty
by Renee Scolaro Rathke

It must be a daunting task to translate to film a book as enormously popular as Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes. (…).

Angela's Ashes director Alan Parker addresses this facet of the filmmaking process in his "production journal," which is posted on the film's official website (www.angelasashes.com). I stumbled on Parker's journal accidentally as I browsed the website, and found it fascinating, not so much because of his rather obvious observation that directors have to make choices, but because his narrative reveals contexts for some of the particular choices he made for this film, which, in the end, often fails to capture the energy and lyricism of McCourt's writing.