This essay examines the subjective limitations of Frank McCourt's celebrated memoir Angela's Ashes, arguing that all memoirs are, to some degree, shaped by the selective and performative nature of memory. Drawing on literary criticism by Shannon Forbes and James B. Mitchell, the paper explores how McCourt's narrative techniques — including reconstituted dialogue, a faux-naïve child's voice, and the collective "we" of community — create a powerful "reality effect" that can feel more authentic than it is. The essay also considers how McCourt's portrayal of his mother diverges from the recollections of community members, raising broader questions about the relationship between memoir, identity, and historical truth.
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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. The author Frank McCourt and his brother Malachy McCourt embody that ascent. 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 a point in time. All memoirs are, to some degree, 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 own mother? Angela's Ashes purports to be both a biography and 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, questions were later raised about McCourt's accuracy when retelling his own life by residents of the Limerick community where he grew up.
Critic Shannon Forbes, quoting a friend of the McCourts, notes that in an essay entitled "I Knew Angela. Did Frank McCourt?" Margaret O'Brien Steinfels wrote that "McCourt got the story wrong" (Forbes 2007). "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 embedded in this reaction: "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 calls into question what a memoir fundamentally is — is it not a series of subjective impressions rather than history? McCourt is partly to blame for creating the perception of a fixed identity for 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 that those he spoke to gave an accurate account in his research for the book. Only by interpreting Angela's Ashes — and all childhood memoirs, perhaps even all memoirs — as a performance of identity "in the moment" rather than a literal account can one call them true, Forbes suggests.
"Applying Butler's performance theory to McCourt's narrative identity"
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