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.