Angela's Ashes

When Frank McCourt looks back on his childhood he calls it miserable: born in Depression-era Brooklyn to recent Irish immigrants and raised in the slums of Limerick, Ireland. His mother Angela has no money to feed the children because his father Malachy rarely works and drinks his wages. Frank survives wearing rags for diapers, begging a pig’s head for Christmas dinner, gathering coal from the roadside, and enduring the casual cruelty of relatives and neighbors. He also lives for his father’s tales of Cuchulain and the Angel on the Seventh Step, which help him endure poverty and near-starvation.