Books That Writers Should Read, Yes

Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt

Note: I have not seen the movie based on the book.

A New York Times #1 bestseller and winner of the Pulitzer Prize, this book is a memoir from Frank McCourt. It gives a vivid description of the poverty and resultant disease that he endured growing up as a child in Ireland.

Even though McCourt wasn't a journalist, he was an English teacher, he provides a very powerful lead and nut graph on the very first page of Chapter 1. After this, it's just the details:

"My father and mother should have stayed in New York where they met and married and where I was born. Instead, they returned to Ireland when I was four, my brother, Malachy, three, the twins, Oliver and Eugene, barely one, and my sister, Margaret, dead and gone.

"When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I survived 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."

Wow--that says it all. The poverty, the senselessness, the hopelessness, the omnipresent, yet foreboding Catholic Church in Ireland, the death and the unhappiness. But what makes this book worth the reading is the little boy that McCourt uses to tell his story. Little Frankie McCourt tells a tale as only a child can, and it is this voice that makes the misery bearable.

Along the way in Angela's Ashes, McCourt buttresses almost every Irish stereotype, providing real-world examples from his family: a father who drinks and drinks and drinks. A family subservient to the Catholic Church, often to their detriment. Potatoes...lots of potatoes. And of course wonderful stories and singing. This book has it all. But first and foremost, it is a great story, well-written. And that my friends, is why Angela's Ashes is a must-read book for all communicators.