Love, Prejudice, Despair, Hope, Poverty, Sacrifice, Selfishness, Church

The film is a true story portraying the McCourt family battling unemployment, their father's alcoholism, poverty, prejudice and infant mortality over a 15 year period, from 1935 to 1950, initially in New York and then for most of that time in Limerick.

The McCourts are a working class Irish family. The father Malachy is a protestant from Ulster while the mother is Roman Catholic from Limerick. The film is seen from the viewpoint of the eldest child, Frank, beginning as a six year old. It chronicles the family's passage through the years as hope gives way to despair, as sacrifice reaches its limits, and as youthful ideals finally find fruition.

Angela's ashes do not actually feature in the film, although they do in the book. The ashes are the remains of a coal fire, since expired, in the family kitchen. Angela, the mother, after years of disappointments and heartache brought on by her irresponsible husband, the death of several of her children, and abject poverty, is once again penniless, and is shown sitting in front of the useless fire pokin

It is here where he met Angela Sheehan and started a relationship with her. When he found out she was pregnant they got married. Work was hard for him to find in America since it was 1930 and the depression was in full swing. Four more kids were born in America. His sons in order of birth; Malachy, the twins; Eugene and Oliver, and his daughter Margaret.

For about 5 years he writes letters to people in Ireland for Mrs. Brigid Finucane, a woman who makes children’s dress clothes. The letters he writes are threatening and are intended to get people to pay up their debts. He hears people talk about how evil someone must be who writes such things, even his own mother says so. He can’t allow anyone to know its him. He is extremely good at getting people to pay up their debts, even tough he despises having to go against the poor people of Limerick. He has to do this to save up money to go to America and to support his family.

Frank McCourt: As the eldest child in the family, with a drunk useless father, Frank stops schooling and gets several different jobs. He helps his uncle deliver papers, and reads to an old man. He later is a Telegram boy for the post office as well as a writer of letters for an old woman. He delivers coal, even though it makes his eyes worse. His last job in Ireland is as a delivery boy of English magazines. All to support his mother and brothers.

Summary This absorbing, sad, humorous evocation of an impoverished Irish Catholic childhood describes the first nineteen years of Frank McCourt's life--from his birth in Brooklyn, New York; through the family's emigration four years later to his mother's roots in the slums of Limerick, Ireland--and ends with McCourt's return migration to America, a young man on his own. McCourt sets the scene in his first lines: "When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I survived at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. . . the poverty; the shiftless loquacious alcoholic father; the pious defeated mother moaning by the fire; pompous priests; bullying schoolmasters . . . . "

Some topics in this essay:
Eventually Frank, Margaret Margaret, Ulster Protestant, Brigid Finucane, Born Depression, Catholic Limerick, York City, St Vincent, Holy Trinity, Eugene Oliver, eldest child, didn’t mind, irish catholic childhood, post office, irish family, stay forever, father malachy, family father, die ireland, mother angela, twins eugene oliver, people pay debts, father's alcoholism,