Angela’s Ashes

"That's the Irish people all over – they treat a serious thing as a joke and a joke as a serious thing."

Sean O'Casey

How can we acknowledge both the good and bad in our past so that we see these experiences for the strength they give us in the present? In this collection of teaching ideas around the memoir Angela’s Ashes, N4 founder and novelist Colum McCann offers a variety of ways of exploring the work of his good friend and mentor Frank McCourt.

"That's the Irish people all over – they treat a serious thing as a joke and a joke as a serious thing." Sean O'Casey

Why Read Angela’s Ashes?

Colum McCann is President and Co-Founder of Narrative 4, which he began to help shape in 2004. He is the author of seven novels and three collections of stories. Born and raised in Dublin, Ireland, he has been the recipient of many international honors, including the National Book Award, the International Dublin Impac Prize, a Chevalier des Arts et Lettres from the French government, election to the Irish arts academy, the 2010 Best Foreign Novel Award in China, and an Oscar nomination. In 2017 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts. His work has been published in over 40 languages. His most recent novel, Apeirogon, was a New York Times bestseller, and winner of several international prizes.

By the time Toni Morrison published Beloved, her fifth novel, she had already won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was an acclaimed novelist. Yet it was Beloved that catapulted her career into the stratosphere, so much so that Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993 for her body of work. This immense critical acclaim alone is enough to warrant our attention. Yet each of us readers must, at some point, approach the novel for ourselves, forming our own opinion.

When a reader first encounters Beloved, it has a similar effect of being set down in the middle of a corn maze. There is no clear path through, and the effect is profoundly disorienting. Even Morrison commented upon this initial encounter with her work, suggesting that she wanted readers to be thrust into “compelling confusion,” likening our placement into her literary world to the same kind of disorientation of an African being kidnapped and thrust into a completely foreign place.

When I first read the book, I experienced that very confusion. I didn’t understand what I was reading, but I understood it was something momentous. At the end of the second chapter, I flipped back to the beginning of the book and started over. I needed to more fully comprehend this 1873 Ohio setting, this Sethe and Paul D and Baby Suggs. What was this Sweet Home place?

I kept returning to a line of dialogue uttered by Sethe in just the first few pages of the novel: “I got a tree on my back and a haint in my house, and nothing in between but the daughter I am holding in my arms. No more running—from nothing.” Ooh, Sethe! Now this was a character fully formed from the very first page, a Black woman both powerful and vulnerable, filled with pain and rage, but also with the single-minded clarity of a survivor.

Let’s be clear. There is significant trauma in the novel. No wonder it is often referenced by the misguided folks who like to ban books. The story of a family struggling with the memories of enslavement is not a fairy tale to be enjoyed like a warm glass of milk on a cold winter night. In some ways, one might even call the novel an American horror story. It certainly contains elements of horror and gothic and the supernatural. The house on Bluestone Road is haunted by a ghost. In African American parlance, we call them “haints.” But Baby Suggs, the mother-in-law of the main character Sethe, declares there is no point in moving. “Not a house in the country ain’t packed to its rafters with some dead Negro’s grief,” she says.

That legacy of hauntings is taken up again in Angela Flournoy’s 2015 novel The Turner House, when one of the main characters, Frances Turner, disputes the idea of a haunted house in 1958 Detroit. “There ain’t no haints in Detroit,” he insists. Yet if you have read that contemporary novel, one written in the literary legacy Morrison left behind for all writers, but especially for African American writers, you know that our country is still haunted by its history and many old houses still possess some version of cultural memory.

Yet Beloved is not a novel lacking hope. The characters are rebuilding their lives after a painful past, and in that gap they try desperately to hold on to the tenuous threads that connect them to each other. Morrison does not offer simple platitudes for her characters’ faith in the future; instead, she embraces their full humanity and complexity.

As my grandmama would say, You say that to say what, child? What I’m saying is that this is the kind of book that can change the way you think of history, the way you think of America, and the way you think of yourself. It is a book that reminds us of the resilience of African American people, the strength of spirit in all of us who call this country home.

In every book I have written, I have tried to capture that remarkable spirit. In my latest novel Take My Hand, I have crafted two sisters whose love for each other and deep connection sustains them throughout the book. When my main character Civil Townsend first meets them in the excerpt you will read, she is only just beginning to understand how the bonds of family will empower these young girls to survive a life-altering event.

It was as if Morrison was saying to me, to us—let me tell you what the novel can do that no other art form can accomplish. Let me show you how a painful tale can be told with heartrending beauty. Let me speak to you of communities and the individuals that inhabit them. Morrison taught us that history was not something to sweep away and dismiss as something shameful. In Beloved, the greatest historical novel ever published in the English language, Morrison challenges us to more fully understand what it means to be American.

When Angela’s Ashes hit the shelves in the late 1990’s, Ireland was a country at the threshold of the thoroughly modern. We were pleased with ourselves, comfortably European, enjoying the sound of our own chatter. Traffic jams on the flyovers. Wild salmon on the plates. The ticker tape parade of mortgage rates. The country was on the cusp of becoming one of the wealthiest nations in the world. Frank’s book arrived like that long-lost relative who knocks on the door during a dinner party, his tie slightly askew and his hands shoved deep in the dark of his pockets. There was a sort of chain lightning to the book. He had another story to tell, and it was a bulwark against forgetting.

Angela’s Ashes was both new and old and wise and innocent, all at the same time. In many ways his story reached all the way back to Joyce’s “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” as a guide to the notion that whoever we are is whoever we once were.

The best stories are those that don’t necessarily want to get told, and then – when they are told – we know that we will never quite hear things the same way again. Narrative 4 students and teachers will know that feeling through the story exchanges that this book will inspire.

There adheres in all of Frank McCourt’s work a sense of astonished being. Nothing is written in abstraction. He was there at the moment when the thorn entered the skin. He waited for the good bread to come out of the oven. The language had energy and momentum. He could break your heart with a gentle word and then take your head off with the next. He reached into our bodies, touched the funny bone, but didn’t let us get away with simple laughter. There was anger there, too, and pride. And his greatness was a lack of fear.

And yet to Frank his own story was the only place he could go. It was entirely natural. There was nothing high-faluting about it at all. He was simply just telling himself that his own experience was valuable – not just the life of his mother, his father, his brothers, but the life of the bowsies, the drunks, the gurriers, the merchantmen, the down-and-outs, the toffees, the tinsmiths, the auld ones, the chisellers. He sought out their remembered texture. He brought the old streets alive, the raindrops on the roof. He wrote as if his life depended on it –and indeed it did.

Now that he is gone, we cannot just make a safe icon out of him. There’s a danger in putting manners on what Frank McCourt did, simply because he was successful. Success breeds an appearance of safety, but what Frank was doing was not safe. It should never be forgotten that he took a risk and that he succeeded at a time when other writers would have laid down their pens. He fought to create. It was all about stamina, desire, perseverance. He caught hold of the old Mark Twain truism that age is an issue of mind over matter – if you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter. Among Frank’s last words were: “And in the morning all will be forgiven.” That was true, but he knew that, in the end, all would be celebrated too.

Questions and Understandings for a Unit

Students could explore the following questions:

What happens when the past and present intersect? What is the impact of our history on our present identity?

How does what we remember reveal who we are?

What does it mean to heal? What does one need to begin healing, even while in the midst of suffering?

How do we create and maintain a community?

How does the social outcast help us understand what we’re trying to ignore? What do they ask us to change in our communities and in ourselves?

How do we cope with deep longing? How do we move on? How do we decide when it’s time to move on?

How does an environment influence populations of people over multiple generations?

What does it mean to be free?

What responsibility (if any) does the individual have to the family? When does that responsibility end (if it does)? When should it end (if it should)?

Students could investigate the following understandings:

Stories we believe about ourselves impact the way we navigate the world.

Becoming free is a process. As Morrison said, “[f]reeing yourself is one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self [is] another.”

Communities are integral in shaping and reshaping the stories that humans share.

Stories are living and ever-evolving. Students could explore the following questions:

What can a loving family look like? Can there be both love and challenges in family relationships?
The last chapter is one word: “Tis” or “it is what it is.” What does that phrase mean to you? Acceptance, cynicism, an ability to embrace the whole, a way of creating some necessary distance from pain,...?
What is the impact of prejudice on our identity? When does a stranger’s opinion of us matter?
Classism is sometimes described as “the forgotten” or “acceptable prejudice.” Why?
How can a child narrator offer a different kind of (maybe more) credibility than an adult narrator?
How does what we remember reveal who we are?
What does it mean to heal? What does one need to begin healing, even while in the midst of suffering?

Students could investigate the following understandings:

Stories we believe about ourselves impact the way we navigate the world.
Memoir focuses on a pivotal period in a person’s life and the author’s point of view is given priority over other participants’ perspective. Giving ourselves space to identify our thoughts and feelings about our experience is often a necessary step towards showing empathy to others.

Sample Teaching Ideas

CREATIVE WRITING Laugh about It

Character Narration

Starting with Chapter 20, there are a series of chapters narrated by individual characters. We get to hear Sethe, Denver, and Beloved through their own words. What makes the characters sound different in these chapters?

ACTIVITY List the distinguishing characteristics of each character’s voice. Discuss with a partner the elements that make each of the women’s voices distinctive.

Next, select a neutrally-narrated chapter and rewrite a portion as if it were narrated by a character. For example, you may write about finding Sethe in the woods from Amy’s perspective, or you may allow Sixo to explain his thoughts about freedom as he walks to meet the thirty-mile woman. How would Amy sound? How might Sixo explain the principle behind his trips? What would their verbal tics be? Would they use witticisms, religious imagery, or humor? Use what you gather from observing and listening to your selected character to inform your writing.

McCourt approaches his childhood with remarkable levity. Both in hindsight and in the moment, he tried to find humor in even the darkest moments. What is humor? What does it mean for something to be funny? Why do we turn to humor?

Can you write or tell a funny story? It can be based on your personal experience or entirely fictional. What do you do to make it funny? How does humor enhance your story?

HISTORY Colonial Roots

Some scholars view Ireland through a colonial lens. The Republic of Ireland is a fairly young country—it only gained independence in 1921. Before then, it had been ruled by the British for most of the previous 700 years. The historical subjugation of Ireland impacted its people, culture, and image.

How do aspects of colonial rhetoric surface in Angela’s Ashes? How do McCourt’s American friends and teachers treat him and his Irishness? How does Frank look at England and the U.S. while he’s in Ireland?

How does modern colonialism look different than past forms of colonialism? Can you differentiate political and corporate colonialism?

FILM Did the book do it better?

In 1999, Angela’s Ashes was adapted into a film. Watch a scene from the movie and compare it to the passage in the text. How did the script differ from the text? Does it look the same as you expected? What artistic choices did the director make to bring the book to life?

You could look at the scene on page 136 where Malachy stumbles home from the pub and tries to give his sons money, page 238 where McCourt says “a doctor would never fart in the presence of a dying boy,” or page 256 where McCourt reads his composition “Jesus and the Weather.”

Return To Programs