Angela's Ashes by Frank Mccourt

Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt The subjective problems of memoirs: the writers' perspective in Angela's Ashes On its surface, Frank McCourt's memoir Angela's Ashes is a true-life story of the American dream -- an Irish family comes to America, and the sons of the family pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, in the form of the author Frank McCourt, and his brother Malachy McCourt.

Along the way, a sister dies, a father falls into alcoholism, and the family must weather the utter indignity of seeing the Statue of Liberty shrink in the distance, as the McCourts head back to Ireland. The story was hailed as revelatory because of its searing honesty and power, and its publication did not attract the 'truthfulness' controversy of later memoirs, such as A Million Little Pieces by James Frey. This is curious in retrospect.

According to many literary critics controversies about the 'truth' of memoirs call into question not just the truth of specific memoirs but the way so many contemporary memoirs, including McCourt's, purport to accurately depict a community or point in time.

All memoirs, to some degree are lies because of their intense subjectivity, and in insisting upon the truth of his recollections, McCourt's memoir falls far short of creating historical accuracy -- at best, he can only convey what he as an adult remembers in an emotional fashion, of his previous life. How can one write about one's childhood, specifically write a biography of one's mother? Angela's Ashes purports to a biography as well as an autobiography, but McCourt saw his mother through the biased eyes of childhood.

"The process of remembering one's life is likewise revisable, subject to incessant reevaluations of particular lived moments" (Mitchell 2003). Although it attracted less publicity, there were questions later raised about McCourt's accuracy when re-telling his own life by the residents of the Limerick community where he grew up. Critic Shannon Forbes, quoting a friend of the McCourt's notes that in an essay entitled "I knew Angela. Did Frank McCourt?" Margaret O'Brien Steinfels wrote "McCourt got the story wrong" (Forbes 20007).

"Angela McCourt used to babysit Steinfels' child, and according to Steinfels...'As I finished the book [Angela's Ashes], I wondered what McCourt was up to, replacing his real mother with a fictive one.. 'the facts' is why I bought the book, hoping to learn more about Angela, the eponymous matriarch'" (Forbes 2007). Forbes notes the curious assumption about identity: "Steinfels, this quotation seems to suggest, assumes that identity is fixed, stable, and transparent to others" (Forbes 2007). Of course no identity is fixed hard and fast.

But Steinfels' claim call into the question of what a memoir is -- is it not a series of impressions of subjectivity, rather than history? McCourt is partly to blame for creating the perception of a fixed identity of his mother, and a 'ripped from the headlines' sense of history: "How, for example, do we account for McCourt's retention of absolutely concrete memories from the time of his conception, as well as his verbatim recollection of conversations exchanged, numbering in the hundreds, and letters written from the time he was a newborn at his own christening? McCourt has guaranteed in interviews that 'all the facts are true'" (Forbes 2007).

McCourt chronicles his life even from infancy, thus assuming those he spoke to gave an accurate account in his research on the book -- only by interpreting Angela's Ashes and all childhood memoirs, perhaps even all memoirs more as a performance of identity 'in the moment' rather than a literal account can one call them true, Forbes suggests.

Forbes writes from a perspective of literary theory heavily influenced by Judith Butler's postmodern analysis of identity as 'performance.' McCourt "the adult author, reflective, witty, older, wiser, and entirely in charge of the text, [is] the one who fashions each page of the memoir" even when he speaks in the voice of the Limerick community or the voice of himself as a child (Forbes 2007).

Just like an author of fiction, he performs an Irishman who has made good in America and uses narrative tools to create that identity, as well as the identity of his mother. He renders his mother -- his poor, oppressed mother, the mother of dead children and the wife of an irresponsible alcoholic -- very different than the far stronger and resilient, and more socially connected individual witnessed by community members like Steinfels.

McCourt's command of the collective voices of the community through reconstituted dialogue and also by chronicling their perceptions of his mother (as seen through his eyes) gives his memoir and authorial tone that is entirely literary in nature but which has been believed as history. In an interesting facet of the narrative technique noted by James B.

Mitchell, because McCourt does not perform an interior childhood identity whose survival is in question -- "he never allows us access into the younger 'Frank's cognitive processes through the device of an interior monologue...he must instead rely upon exterior dialogue and construct a community identity that is still a product of his own consciousness" (Mitchell 2003). McCourt creates those members of the dialogue and voices of the community and calls them objectively true -- although his memoir is a storyteller's masterful performance that can only render his current perceptions.

When he does adopt a child's voice is a "faux naive narrative voice" with a "selfless sense of responsibility, bordering on masochism" which "has helped secure the book's vast audience, since the innocent veracity of children is sacrosanct in American society, and a child racked with guilt tells a particularly compelling tale" even though the book suspiciously has a literary quality in its overall tone.