"When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I managed to survive at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.".
Frank McCourt with humor, compassion, heartache and forgiveness brings us through the first nineteen years of his life. His story was described as one of courage and survival, against apparently overwhelming odds. From the beginning he had to learn to live in dire poverty, with an alcoholic father, prejudice, hunger and death. His survival .
It is amazing how he was able to live through his miserable childhood with such energy and little bitterness. His starvation becomes a way of life, as their father drank away the money, although he loved his children and they knew it. He might not have been able to provide for them materially, he was a weak man, living with guilt put upon him by being from the north, and the death of three children; alcoholism seemed to be the easiest way out.
"I think my father is like the Holy Trinity with three people in him, the one in the morning with the paper, the one at night with the stories and the prayers, and then the one who does the bad thing and comes home with the smell of whiskey.".
Frank's unconditional love for his father, consented to his survival, as this opened up a whole new look on life; instead of turning his terrible misfortune into anger and hate, he was able to concentrate it into humor, which confers physical as well as psychic benefits.
The first four years of Frank's life was spent in America, where the death of his first and only little sister traumatizes his parents. Soon after, they return to Ireland where he finds himself alienated in his parental homeland. "It didn't matter that there were six of us in a bed, we were together." Once again the love of the family seems to conquer all, as it is shocking how they were able to endure being infested by fleas, having the lavatory of the whole street outside their door, attracting rats and flies, and a flooded house forcing five people to live in two tiny rooms.