Telling it like it was

Ireland is famous for its writers. Big names in literature like James Joyce, Samuel Beckett and WB Yeats were born in Ireland. But when I think of all the ways people have written about the country, one author really stands out. Frank McCourt was born in New York in 1930. His family moved back to Ireland when Frank was four. Living in the city of Limerick, on the west coast of Ireland, the family was very poor. His father was an alcoholic and Frank had to leave school at 13 to work to support his mother and three brothers.

Luckily for Frank he returned to the US as a young man, went to university and began teaching English in high schools in New York. But Frank never forgot his terrible childhood and wrote about it in his world-famous book Angela's Ashes (1996). Director Alan Parker made the book into a film in 1999. Angela's Ashes is an extremely powerful, tragic book but is one of the most realistic portrayals of Ireland I've ever read or seen. It'll make you cry, but in the end you'll be happy you read it.

Frank wrote two more autobiographies, ‘Tis in 1999 and Teacher Man in 2005, both set in the US. The reason I'm talking about Frank right now is because he died last week on 19 July 2009. I'll miss him for his honesty and his humour. Thanks to Frank, Ireland learned to accept what the country was really like back in the 1930s and 1940s.