ANGELA’S ASHES, Frank McCourt By Jesse RHINES, 2009
Jeannette Walls suffered an American childhood similar to that of Frank McCourt’s in Ireland.Poverty assailed both kids’ lives despite the presence of both biological parents.Paternal alcohol abuse is also a domineering factor in both cases.In Jeannette’s dad that is explained by his sexually abusive mother but similar detail is missing for Frank’s dad.Rather, he is presented as just a drunk who’d relapse after every tepid attempt at sobriety.
The contradictions between neglect of yet attentiveness to their children is striking in both families.McCourt’s father told him stories and gave a real feeling of Irish history and culture--when he was around.Walls’ mom gave her children a strong philosophical grounding through direct, though often unfortunate, counsel when the kids seemed to demand it.For example, after hospitalization due to burns gained during unsupervised cooking, Mrs. Walls allowed her three-year old to cook, again unsupervised, counseling that, “…you can’t live in fear of something as basic as fire.”
I also endured an early life of poverty but it does not compare in horror to either Jeannette’s or Frank’s.We were twelve siblings by the time I finished high school and had moved yearly since my fifth birthday to increasingly blighted neighborhoods.Presence of a stepfather brought no physical improvement, but as both the Walls and McCourt wives did, Mother needed a man.I wonder if it was primarily a sexual need.After all, when her husband left, Frank’s wife took up with a male relative.My mother bore at least one child after my dad’s death—which was while my brother was still in her belly.I’ve heard that one half-sibling died in childbirth and recall another being adopted away by the time I was five and before Mother’s ten-year marriage with my first stepfather.Is sex that much of a need?I guess for some people it is, hence the labels satyriasis and nympho for hypersexual males and females, respectively. I once had a girlfriend who asked if it were OK that she was a whore.In many dictionaries, however, “whore” implies more selling than doing, even though the latter dominates contemporary American usage.
But sex may also have been what kept Walls’s mother with her father.After all, he was not protecting her or her children and certainly did not “bring home the bacon.”Maybe it was the “sausage” that kept her with such a self-centered, ineffectual, increasingly debilitating and dangerous a drunk.
But would I trade either of their young lives for my own?I’ve had a few girlfriends but the longest was only a year and a half.Mother, the Walls and The McCourts were married more than ten years each. I have a feeling of loneliness less often now, but in the past it has been much stronger between romances.I have had sex with a partner less than twice a year in the last seven years.Of course this may be due in part to impediments from heart disease and prostate cancer.I guess most observers would say that it is companionship, rather than “just sex,” that even unhealthy couples are after.So, would I make the trade for the companionship and accept the unhealthy dysfunction?God, is that ever a crazy choice?That kind of compulsive togetherness must be forced on one by either government divorce restrictions or some personal psychological disability.My brother, the one in Mother when our dad died, has urged me for years to “just get married.”He thinks I’m chicken because I haven’t tried that on for size.He’s always been the person I’m closest to in my family and I know he wants me to take the happiness of his marriage as my example and model.However, I remind him that he had an unsuccessful marriage before this one.Besides, if I keep breaking up with girlfriends, why should I marry one when my norm is that I’ll want to break up within two years?If a romance seems right before it seems wrong, I may sign on the line in that relationship.But if it never happens, the thought that I could help reduce a family to what the Walls, The McCorts or Mother reduced their families to provides a powerful warning and prohibition.I mean, that’s probably why the former two wrote their memoirs, as warning, right?
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Really excellent memoir:Her feral parents taught me about my feral brother.He's really intelligent but lives basically in a park and says, "I hate structure."They weren't crazy and neither is he."A feral organism is one that has escaped from domestication and returned, partly or wholly, to a wild state."