Late Bloomer Frank McCourt and the Creation of “Angela’s Ashes”
If you think you’re too old to write a book, perhaps a memoir, you might want to look at the case of Frank McCourt, who wrote the blockbuster Angela’s Ashes after his retirement as English teacher in the New York City public schools. He was 66 when it was published in 1996 to widespread acclaim, winning a Pulitzer Prize.
Now, granted, we haven’t all experienced McCourt’s impoverished childhood, circumstances that, in his telling, were positively Dickensian, or have his well-honed Irish sense of humor. Still, he did not believe his memoir would amount to much. As he told New York times reporter Robert Sullivan shortly after its publication,
“I’m amazed,’’ he said, ‘’because I thought it was a modest book, modestly written, and that it might have a modest reception. I’ve often said that poverty is rarely portrayed well, and I tried to portray the stink of poverty, and you know, the other night I was opening pages, because it’s been quite a while since I handed it in, and I was laughing, because of the way something was put.”
Still, McCourt credited his third wife, Ellen Frey McCourt, with pushing him to stop merely telling the stories and to start writing them down. Shortly after they married in 1994, Frank started writing during the day and reading his pages back to her the next morning over coffee. Friends saw her as the “tuning fork,” who encouraged him to leaven the grim material with humor. The result speaks for itself.
Frank McCourt wrote two follow up memoirs, ‘Tis and Teacher Man. He died in July, 2009 at the age of 78.
Sources:
https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/26/nyregion/26about.html
https://www.nytimes.com/1996/09/01/magazine/the-seanachie.html?smid=em-share
