In May the Braille and Talking Book club that I belong to read Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt. That month’s moderator wanted to read literary fiction and we advised that she choose something likeable and accessible. The last person to choose literary fiction opted for a book that took some work to like (what’s more it happened to be his favorite book), it got a negative reception, and that moderator hasn’t been back to book club. That was over a year ago. We didn’t want a repeat.
So, we read Angela’s Ashes. I read this book when it came out and liked it a great deal. This time through I did not like it nearly as much.
This time through I read with a more critical (read: cautious) eye. I picked up early that chapters and chapters worth of finely detailed material happened when the author was but five, six, seven years old. The only way he could have gotten that kind of detail was from his parents yet he doesn’t credit them with providing that.
Dragon is in this book club as well and we had made a pact to TRY to read Angela’s Ashes. We exchanged texts as the chapters ticked by. Finally, she gave up. Too depressingly, unremittingly, unsalvagebly bleak she pronounced. A few chapters later I declared my own end to the re-read. Hubby soldiered through to the end.
The reason I stopped reading was not because the material was bleak. Bleak I can tolerate. What bothered me was that I was feeling lied to, cheated at a fundamental level.
It has to do with another memoir -or rather series of them – published by a writer who called himself Nasdijj. I’d read him since my original introduction to Ashes. Nasdijj claimed he was Native American, the child of migrant workers, father of a dead child, mercilessly beaten down by the white man all his life. And he was vociferously bitter. He could be painfully eloquent as he was in his first book, “The Blood Runs Like a River Through My Dreams” or just the other side of articulate, falling unfortunately flat in the realm of “this just doesn’t make any sense” on his blog and in the hand-made books he sent me.
Hand-made books he sent me? Yes, because I was sending this guy cash every month to support his writing. Turns out he was a white guy from no place other than Lansing, Michigan. Probably a bit on the unstable side and definitely not the Native American son of migrant farm workers. He went to Eastern High School not five miles from where I sit right now.
So, while re-reading Angela’s Ashes I was particularly sensitive to what the author could legitimately be telling the truth about and what had to be artifice. And the scales weren’t working out in his favor.
How much of ones early life can one recreate from the emotional truths of adult life and still tell the story as if it is non-fiction? I wanted to give Frank McCourt credit for doing just that, a practice which would have redeemed him to a great extent in my eyes, but I simply couldn’t. His book was too slick, too pitiful, and too careful.
I’m just that little bit jaded now; I can’t enjoy a good memoir without feeling like the facts – at least as remembered by the author – aren’t embellished beyond a tolerance level that I can’t measure objectively. Put another way, I need memoirs that don’t set off my bullshit meter, and that’s purely subjective and individual to each new title I pick up.
By the way, the book club loved the book.
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