Fictional Devices in 'Angela's Ashes' that Make It a Page-Turner

Voice, Memory, and Humor in Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt

When I first read Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes, I didn’t expect a story about poverty to feel this real. The book is sad but it’s also funny, sincere, and told in a voice that sounds like someone is just talking to me. McCourt recalls things as they come, like a friend confiding a precious secret through easy, engaging storytelling.

I feel so immersed in his story that I refuse to let go until everything has been told. And even when I finally put the book down, I find myself wanting to go back and walk again through those same alleyways of struggle, to listen to the rain in Limerick, to meet the people who made his difficult life somehow full.

Being poor is no joke, but looking back on desperate times with tenderness, that’s what makes Angela’s Ashes unforgettable for me. It’s a remembrance of hardship that turns into wonder, a story that insists on gratitude and celebrates the stubborn will to live.

His Heart on His Sleeve

McCourt writes in the voice of the boy he once was, curious, confused, and full of whys. The book begins with, “When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I managed to survive at all.” In the Philippine context, surviving poverty is almost ordinary. It has become part of daily life for many, not just a temporary lack of basic needs. Poverty here is systemic, like a hammer that never stops pounding, even when all the nails are in. It’s a structure built on corruption and apathy from those in power, so deeply rooted that it feels impossible to escape.

What makes Angela’s Ashes remarkable is that it does not use poverty as spectacle. Reading McCourt’s story, I can’t help but think of other narratives that turn suffering into material for commercial emotion. Many TV documentaries or films that showcase misery for shock or sympathy often lose sight of what truly matters. Within deprivation, humanity becomes only an element of the story and not its heart.

McCourt’s memoir also carries a voice of desperation, but it is not a cry against government or society. It is the remembrance of one family’s misfortune, told with humor and grace. It feels intimate, like a boy quietly making sense of his difficult childhood. When McCourt recalls his father’s endless stories about Cuchulain, the Irish hero, he writes of how they listened “about Cuchulain till we fall asleep.” The repetition feels like both love and fatigue. Yet what stays with me is not bitterness but endurance.

McCourt as That Worldly Boy

McCourt paid close attention to the world of his past. His descriptions of the Limerick houses “leaning against each other for comfort” are not just about the buildings, but about how everyone is trying to hold on to something, or someone. Even the rain becomes alive, described as “an old man with a hatchet chopping away at your bones.” Reading that, I can almost feel the cold creeping into my own skin and bones.

I can’t help but think of scenes closer to home: families whose houses are washed away by floods, or street dwellers sleeping under torn tarpaulins and plastic scraps from blown-away billboards. McCourt’s Limerick rain feels like the same rain that soaks us here, different weather, same helplessness.

The way McCourt writes his characters lingers in my mind, then drifts toward memories of our own storms. Yet the memoir never turns toward complaint or longing for better circumstances. Misfortune, for McCourt, is not only about hunger or cold. The deeper calamity is the absence of love, a house without warmth, a father without tenderness. That, more than poverty or rain, is the memory that hurts the most.

Humor and Heartbreak in Angela’s Ashes

In Angela’s Ashes, McCourt never lets tragedy take the grandest bow. Humor becomes a gentle balm, a kind of therapeutic massage on what was surely a traumatic boyhood. When his father, Malachy, comes home drunk and singing patriotic songs, McCourt recalls how he would wake the children and make them promise to die for Ireland. It’s absurd and funny and I laugh out loud reading it, but I also sense McCourt's admiration and resentment. He sees his father’s weaknesses clearly, yet he also recognizes the love that hides behind them.

How we, too, learn to live with the contradictions of our parents, their strength and failures, their care and carelessness. We carry them with us long after we've left our ancestral homes. Reading McCourt, I feel hugging some parents to tell them, "You did your best with what little you had, thank you po."

McCourt exalts dignity in exhaustion. Angela, their mother, often scolds her children for finishing the bread too soon. But her irritation is not cruelty; it’s her way of holding the family together. How easily we take our mothers for granted. Angela’s Ashes reads like a quiet elegy to all mothers who insist on life even when appetite fades before too-small portions and flavorless meals. The book pays tribute to this often unnoticed endurance that keeps a family alive, as her love rises above this brutal reality of hunger.

Why McCourt’s Story Still Feels Close to Home

Angela’s Ashes is Irish, yet it feels deeply familiar. Every Filipino family trying to make ends meet, every parent carrying the daily weight of how not to raise a child into sickness, shame, or hopelessness, all of these fill my imagination with what-if

What if we give our present moments the best kind of care?
What if we fill our days with gratitude for every chance to love and to connect?
What if, in every calamity, we find a call to provide for those in need?
And what if, when we reach the future, we can retrieve healthy memories, not of mere survival, but of a life lived to the fullest?

As writers, we are always searching for the language that can make sense of our daily lives. But then again, here we are, the past has passed, and all we can do is remember, whether in fondness or regret. When we write moments from our own existence, we are reminded by the personal stories we’ve been reading or listening to lately. How are they told, and how do we, as writers, find ourselves resonating with them? And what about Angela’s Ashes? What clear takeaway can we hold from this poignant memoir about endurance, grace, and remembering what keeps us human?

We might be surprised how our own narrative will turn out, hopefully inspired, and inspiring in its own quiet way.

Live your future now

Write from where you breathe, move, and have your being. Today, let this moment bring out the best of you.