Angela's Ashes

I'm going to try to store pictures on my google drive because I'm running out of space here on Neocities so we'll see how that goes.

This book really just leaves you going, "God damn, Frankie."

I like rambling old man stories, so I liked this, but that's what it is. I don't even really know that I would classify it as a book, it's not written like a book, even like a memoire, it's written like an old man told you a story, and you wrote it down word for word exactly as he spoke it with no regard for things like capitalization or punctuation. This stype is particularly buckwild to me because the author's blurb says that Frankie McCourt is or was an English teacher. So Jesus Christ, goddamn. An English teacher, he was, and not a single quotation mark in the whole book, despite the tons of dialogue. Frank, do you sincerely not see how that would make a bitch want to kill your ass? Like I speak with a dialect, I get what you were going for, but that's no excuse to write like a jackass.

Look at this shit.

There's like 4 quotation marks that should have been in that one section but weren't, and the whole damn book is like that. It boggles the mind.

Apparently I'm the only person on the planet who thinks that makes it ridiculously hard to read though, because the cover said it won a Pulitzer, so there you go, you can write the whole book like you sincerely don't give half a shit about it and still win awards if the story is sad enough. And damn, is this story sad. Which sucks, because it's true, it's a memoire.

So this is about Frank and his shitty childhood, which is primarilly shitty because his dad is a drunk and keeps drinking up every penny the family has, so they have to move out of the states and back to Ireland with his mom, Angela's mom, so his granny, but she doesn't want them in her house because she is just altogether a dick, like the whole book she just dickish things, pretty much every time she's in the book. The only time I can think that she wasn't a complete jackass to everybody including her own daughter and grandbabies is when one of the grandbabies dies. But who the hell kicks their own kid and her children out when they're literally starving and destitute? This bitch.

Once in Ireland, his dad stays a drunk, so he can't keep a job and even drinks up the welfare money, to the point that the family is literally starving and has to give their little baby sugar water instead of formula, and their kids keep dying. It says on the first page of the book that a bunch of his siblings die, so it's not a spoiler, it just is shitty?? Like knowing that it's going to happen doesn't make it any better because they're literal babies.

That's pretty much the whole book, his dad, who is named Malachy, is a piece of shit and because of it Frank and his siblings that live to adulthood, grow up in abject poverty, exclusively because of his shittyness. His mom tries, like she is out here begging on the street at points to be able to feed her kids level trying, but she won't leave her husband because she thinks Jesus would get mad at her, so she stays with the piece of shit who drinks up every penny they have so her kids don't haev clothes or blankets or food. Like I read about a lot of shitty parents, but Malachy McCourt needs himself an asswhooping, and I kept thinking that Frank or Malachy Jr. would give him one, but if they do I don't remember it. Just what an absolute piece of shit. Just... no redeming qualities whatsoever.

At one point, Angela gets really sick because their house uses a coal stove for heat and they have no coal to burn, and it's in rainy cold Ireland, and she's literally not eating hardly any food, because she wants her kids to have what little she can beg for, so her immune system is completely shot, and the kids have to go stay with her sister and her husband, so their aunt and uncle, while she's in the hospital recovering. During this time Frank laments that he really wishes he could have his uncle Pa as his dad, because they'd have a warm house with food, and you just get reminded that his own father is such a detestable person.

The book really pulls you in, it really reminds me of the kind of stories my gramps tells me growing up in the mining camp he lived in as a child. Like it is that level of abject poverty, here it's not because of a giant corporation holding an entire town hostage and paying people in script, it is exclusvely because of his father being a shitty person, but it has that same vibe. So if you, like I do, love you some rambling old man stories about how we kids today don't know how good we got it, this is the book for you. You'll love it. I love that sort of thing, and apparently so do a lot of other people, because as I said, this book has won awards, it was a New York Times best seller, and it had a movie adaptation that I don't know whether or not I want to watch because I don't know how well you can transfer that aspect, the writer's voice of the 'old man telling it like it is' vibe, to a movie. See, you can do that with a book because it literally is just Frankie telling the story. But with a movie you can't really have him narrate the entire thing, so I'm not sure how you could do that.

Also, I kept thinking that Angela would die and they would cremate her, because everybody kept dying, but she never did, nor did she really have any ashes of any kind throughout the entire book, so I have no clue why this is called, "Angela's Ashes". Angela is his mom, but there's no ashes. So... yeah, I got nothing, I don't know what that's about.

But, Frank seems like an alright guy, this isn't a book about someone famous, it's literally just some guy, just an old man story. I love it. I'm going to try to find the sequal, 'Tis because I liked this one so much. I'm more excited about that than I am the movie. So all in all, 9/10, godawful grammer, barely readable, but a really good book.

Also, I want to say that the copy I got was an overstock, I think, because it has clearance stickers on it, but then was further marked down to $1, then even further marked down to a quarter at the rag store I got it from. So despite it being so popular, someone really, really did not want this particular copy. So maybe it's haunted or something. It was printed in 1996, so it took 30 years for somebody to read this particular copy, and I'm pretty sure I was the first person to do so, because it was in perfect condition when I got it. I just think that's weird.