photo slide show

growing up to fast

It took me almost a lifetime to absorb the blows of my childhood so thoroughly I had to grow up fast. I was able to write about my bleak upbringing in a an alcoholic household in limerick Ireland.I have to grow up fast and go get money for my family because we live in abject poverty in limerick's notorious slums and sharing the same flea-ridden bed with my family. 

Another reason I wanted and need to grow up was we were hungry and always cold and my father wasn’t here to help so I stepped up. When my baby brother dies of pneumonia and than the following six months later I really had to step up because my mom just lost my younger siblings and she had a lot on her back by trying her best by herself t take care of all her kids on her own.

which was hard because we were poor and didn’t have nothing because our father spend our money to get drink which i guess more important than his family. I stepped up to help and show my mother what a real man should do which was to help there family and struggle with them and not leave them and also setting an example for my younger siblings. 


Neary, Lynn. “Frank McCourt's Humor Transcended Tragedy.” NPR, NPR, 20 July 2009, www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=106795160.

“Frank McCourt, 1930 - 2009.” Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Times, latimesblogs.latimes.com/thedailymirror/2009/07/frank-mccourt-1930-2009-.html.

My relationship with my father

I had a Love/Hate Relationship with my Father. My father put me and my siblings and mother through hell and back as a kid. I constantly changed the way I felt about my  father. all the hard times he has put me and his family through. My father has put us threw many difficulties any caused many problems.

 Sometimes I completely despises my father Malachy from the hurt/ pain he put us threw.

 My father Malachy is constantly out of a job and always leaving his family to survive on
our own through poverty when he should be with us it hurts but I have to deal with it.  He uses every single penny we need to help us to  have at the pubs. i

t drives me crazy and its not fair I didn’t ask for this and sometimes I lose all respect for my father because he knows right from wrong and what hes doing to us isn't  fair or right.I really really hate and cant stand when my father  makes my mother angry I just want my mother happy. I wish I could have a better life and better father.

" He said we have our troubles but its time for malachy and me to start school because theirs nothing like an education, it will stand to you in the end , and you have to get ready to do your bit for Ireland " ( McCourt 78)

#248207, alyssa b, et al. “Compare and Contrast Frank's Relationship to His Mother and Father in the Novel, Angela's Ases. | Angela's Ashes Questions | Q & A.” GradeSaver: Getting You the Grade, www.gradesaver.com/angelas-ashes/q-and-a/compare-and-contrast-franks-relationship-to-his-mother-and-father-in-the-novel-angelas-ases-74693.

“Angela's Ashes - Frank McCourt's Love/Hate Relationship with His Father.” Similarities of Hip-Hop and the Blues :: Rap Music, www.123helpme.com/preview.asp?id=98772.

life in Ireland

 Me and my family returned to Ireland due to the Depression and we continued to struggle with poverty. My father abandoned me and my family because of drinking when I was in my early teens.  when I was 19, I returned to the U.S. to  serve in the Korean War and graduated from Brooklyn College. My family frequently struggled to make ends meet and after a long stint of unemployment during the Depression we returned to their native Limerick, Ireland, in 1934.

 Me and my family continued to flounder, however, sinking deeper into poverty. When I was 13, my father had stopped communicating with the family essentially abandoning us. Once he did that I had to step up as a man and I left school that same year to earn money for my family, working odd jobs and committing petty thefts to help keep his surviving siblings alive.

I also saved some for my own dream: To return to America one day again. I didn’t have the best life, but I must step up in my father's place and become a man because he wasn’t man enough to take care of his family. I was carrying my family because my father wasn’t there, and my mom couldn’t have done it herself, so I stepped up like a man.

" Malachy tells aunt Aggie one day he's hungry and could he have a piece of bread."(Mc court 248)

“Frank McCourt.” Biography.com, A&E Networks Television, 19 May 2015, www.biography.com/people/frank-mccourt-9391286.

childhood

My childhood is ''an epic of woe.'' Besides my father who drank away the family's meager food money. My mother who was reduced to begging, i had  three siblings who died in infancy from illness. 

 My family were too poor to afford sheets or blankets for their flea-infested bed, too poor to buy new shoes for the children. Also, we were too poor to get milk for the new baby. A boiled egg was considered a luxury, a bit of discarded apple peels a coveted treat. 

My parents started out as immigrants in New York, but America hadn't turned out to be the promised land they'd hoped. Not only was my family trying to cope with the Depression, but  my father Malachy McCourt also had a way of taking his sporadic paychecks to the local bar and not returning home. It wasn't long before the family was headed back across the Atlantic to Ireland, where there were relatives who could help with the four children. 

My father tells me about ''the old days in Ireland when the English wouldn't let the Catholics have schools,'' and he tells him about the world beyond the shores of Ireland where men like Hitler, Mussolini and ''the great Roosevelt'' make history. He bequeaths to Frankie two things: a childhood of awful, bone-chilling poverty and illness, and a magical gift for storytelling. 

Kakutani, Michiko. “Generous Memories of a Poor, Painful Childhood.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 17 Sept. 1996, www.nytimes.com/1996/09/17/books/generous-memories-of-a-poor-painful-childhood.html.

Grimes, William. “Frank McCourt, Whose Irish Childhood Illuminated His Prose, Is Dead at 78.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 19 July 2009,