Why is Angela's Ashes written in the present tense?

Because the present tense narrows what the narrator can see. Le Guin's distinction is the useful one here: past-tense narration gives access to the time before and after a moment, and the present gives a small brightly lit field with nothing around it. That narrow field is the one a child occupies. The opening pages are the exception and they prove the rule, since they look back in the past tense at his parents in Brooklyn, and then the tense changes and stays changed once the childhood proper starts. The cost lands on McCourt throughout. Every insight has to be dramatised, since there is no narrator standing outside the scene who is allowed to state it.

Why does Frank McCourt write dialogue without quotation marks?

One marked line of speech would give the boy a defence he does not have. Speech and perception share one surface in Angela's Ashes, so what a priest says arrives already inside the child's head, unweighed and unsorted, which is where the irony lives. Look at what the choice costs him. Attribution has to be carried by idiom, and a scene with three speakers who sound alike collapses into noise, which is why the technique is worth borrowing only after your people talk differently.

How does the comedy in Angela's Ashes avoid trivialising the poverty?

The laugh is aimed upward. O'Connor's rule is the one to keep: the maximum amount of seriousness admits the maximum amount of comedy. Bakhtin's is that laughter brings an object close enough to finger, which is what McCourt does to the church, the school and the charity office. The joke lands on the institution or on the absurd rule, and the child keeps his dignity while the rule loses its. Timing is the other half. Comedy placed before the reader understands the stakes reads as flippancy, and comedy placed after the stakes are clear reads as survival, which is why the funniest passages tend to sit inside the worst scenes rather than between them.

What does Teacher Man teach that Angela's Ashes does not?

The narrator is now an adult, failing in public. McCourt opens in a classroom at McKee Vocational and Technical High School on Staten Island, where a boy throws a sandwich, and he picks it up off the floor and eats it in front of the class, and he reports the whole thing without once telling you how clever the move was. Same restraint, no child to hide behind. Later he sets his students to writing excuse notes from Adam and Eve to God, or from Judas, and the book lets that assignment carry its own argument about how writing gets taught. For a memoirist the lesson is portability. The tense lock and the withheld verdict work on last Tuesday as well as they work on a childhood in Limerick.

What can writers learn from Frank McCourt's use of repetition?

Each return carries one change. The dole queue, the walk to the St Vincent de Paul for a docket, the same phrase out of the Confraternity: they come back through the book, and what has moved between appearances is the boy's standing, so the repetition reports on him rather than on itself. Le Guin's caution is the useful test here, and it applies to any memoirist looking for a shape. Structural repetition works when the pattern was already in the life, and it cheats when unlike events are forced into a shape, which a reader detects faster than most writers expect. Look for the return that happened without you. Then put it on the page as often as it happened.

Can you use his method if your own childhood was ordinary?

Yes, and the ordinary case is the better test. What generates the effect is the gap between a narrator's vocabulary and a reader's understanding, and that gap does not require hunger. It requires a narrator honestly unable to see the whole of his own situation. A dull suburb works. Put a child in it who cannot name what the adults are doing to each other, price everything the way McCourt prices a loaf and a pint, keep the tense in the present, and take out the paragraph where you explain. What remains will be small and specific, which is the register McCourt worked in for three books. He did it with a wet mattress and a shilling.

Non fiction

Frank McCourtWriting Style

Born 8/19/1930 – Died 7/19/2009

Narrate through the child who lived it and time the irony for the adult who survived. Hard scenes stop asking for pity.

Write like Frank McCourt

Writing Style Overview

Writing style overview of Frank McCourt: voice, themes, and technique.

Angela's Ashes begins in the past tense. An adult remembers his parents, Brooklyn, a marriage arranged in a hurry. Then the tense changes and does not change back: the rest of the childhood arrives in the present, as it happens, with no older voice standing behind it to explain. Limerick is where that present tense does its work. The family lives on Roden Lane, in a house whose ground floor floods when it rains, so they move upstairs and call the dry room Italy and the wet room Ireland. A child would say that. Only a child would keep saying it.

The method lives in a gap. He tells you his father drinks the wages and then wakes the children at night to make them promise to die for Ireland, and he tells it as a thing fathers do, without a word of judgment, so the judgment is yours to make and you cannot put it down once you have made it. Nothing is explained. Oliver dies, and Eugene dies after him, in the same flat present tense that reported the weather, and the voice does not rise for either. Restraint like that is not coldness. A child reports a death that way, and McCourt declines to correct him from the outside, which is why the book stays out of the register of case study.

Then there is the laughing. McCourt vomits his First Communion breakfast in his grandmother's backyard, and what horrifies her is the theology of it, because God is now in her backyard and a priest will have to be consulted about what to do with the mess. The scene is funny. It is also a child finding out that the adults around him will rank a doctrinal problem above his own body.

The transferable part has nothing to do with the accent. Look instead at a narrator permitted to know less than his author knows, and at what that does to the sentences. Try it for one page. You will find out how much of your prose was you, explaining. Across the three books the same instrument works at three ages: Limerick in Angela's Ashes, the Biltmore lobby and NYU in 'Tis, and a Staten Island classroom in Teacher Man. Older voice. Same refusal to sum up.

How to Write Like Frank McCourt

Writing techniques and exercises to emulate Frank McCourt.

1
Switch to present tense and pull the quotation marks
Take one page you have already written about your own childhood, and retype the whole of it in the present tense. Then delete the quotation marks and let the speech run on inside the sentences, the way McCourt does throughout Angela's Ashes, so that a line of dialogue has the same weight as a description of the rain. Change nothing else. Read both versions aloud. The retyped one will be missing the sentences where you stepped forward to explain, because the present tense has no room for them, and that absence is the point of the exercise rather than a loss.
2
Give the narrator a smaller vocabulary than you have
Write a list of the abstract nouns you reach for when you describe your own past: poverty, neglect, trauma, shame, addiction. Ban all five. What is left is what a child could name, and in McCourt's Limerick that means the dole, the pawn shop, a shilling, a wet mattress, the loaf that has to last. Your material will have its own countable things. Find them. Institutional words are the exception, and they should come in unexplained, the way the boy says Confraternity and Dispensary without once telling you what either place does to his mother.
3
Write the humiliation straight, then find the laugh inside it
Draft the worst moment with no jokes in it at all. Then look for the absurd rule somebody was enforcing while it happened, because that is where McCourt finds his comedy: a grandmother more worried about God being in her backyard than about the sick child who put him there. Put the funny beat after the reader knows what is at stake, and keep it inside the character's logic. One test: is the pain still visible while you laugh? If the joke has covered the wound, delete the joke.
4
Chain with and, then land short
Take one paragraph and rewrite it as a single sentence joined by and, with no because and no although anywhere in it, so that the events arrive in the order the narrator met them and the reader has to hold all of them at once. Then write the next sentence in four words. The drop is the effect. For a model, take the walk home with the pig's head for the Christmas dinner, one small indignity after another. You cannot land like that unless the accumulation was real.
5
Find the pattern already in the life
Le Guin's warning about structural repetition in memoir is the one to keep taped to the desk: a pattern found in a life is craft, and a pattern forced onto unlike events is cheating. Look for what came back on its own. In Angela's Ashes it is the return to the pawn shop, the return of the father's promises, the return of a death in the family. Repeat yours three times with the context changed each time. The first appearance orients the reader, the second makes a pattern, and the third makes the reader dread the fourth.

Frank McCourt's Writing Style

Breakdown of Frank McCourt's writing style: sentence structure, tone, pacing, and dialogue.

Sentence Structure

Count the ands. McCourt strings clauses with and where a writer trained on subordination would put because or although, and the effect is a boy reporting in the order things reach him, one thing then the next thing then the thing after that. The chain also swallows speech. A priest's line arrives inside the same sentence as the weather and the wet coat, with no quotation marks and no he said to slow it down. Then a short sentence lands, the paragraph stops moving, and you notice the noise it was making. That is the whole rhythm: accumulate, then drop.

Vocabulary Complexity

His word-stock is a child's, with one exception. Institutional language comes in whole and unchewed: the Confraternity, the Dispensary, the dole, consumption, the Angelus, the state of grace. The boy uses these terms correctly and has no idea what they cost, which is where the irony sits, since the reader hears a child fluent in the vocabulary of his own containment. What he lacks is the abstract noun. Poverty, trauma, class, alcoholism: none of them appear in his mouth, because he does not have them yet, so the page has to carry the meaning through bread, coal, a shilling, a wet mattress.

Tone

Warm, and completely unsentimental about that warmth. Uncle Pa Keating comes home black from the gas works and says the blunt thing the rest of the room is avoiding, and the affection in that portrait is plain while the man himself stays unsoftened for the reader's comfort. The anger runs underneath, dry. It shows up as a flat report of what a priest said, or of the way the St Vincent de Paul Society made a woman stand and ask. You are entertained and then implicated, usually inside the same paragraph, and the second feeling is the one he wants.

Pacing

The present tense removes the escape hatch. Time moves at the speed of attention, and the gaps between chapters do the compressing that a retrospective narrator would do inside a sentence. Watch what gets the space. Frank lies in the fever hospital with typhoid and a girl in the next ward, Patricia Madigan, feeds him The Highwayman line by line until the nun separates them, and that stretch of days is given room while whole seasons of hunger go past in a paragraph. The rule is legible once you have seen it twice, and it holds across all three books. Space goes where standing changed.

Dialogue Style

There are no quotation marks. Speech sits in the paragraph with everything else, unmarked, so a teacher's reprimand and a description of the rain have the same typographic status and arrive at the same speed. The choice is functional. It removes the little pause a reader takes at an opening quotation mark, the pause in which you brace yourself, and without it the cruelty lands flush against the weather. What people say is usually a move: the priest instructing, the official assessing, the mother managing a drunk man. The boy agrees too fast. Ask who pays for each line.

Descriptive Approach

Objects do the arguing. The wet mattress, the flea bites, the one lavatory the whole lane shares and it stands beside the McCourt door, the bread counted out: these are exhibits, not atmosphere, and each one is doing work a sentence about poverty would do worse. Description also arrives mid-action, in the middle of a walk or a queue, because a child notices what interrupts him. Nothing gets painted. A detail earns its place by changing what happens next, and a detail that only decorates gets cut.

Signature Writing Techniques

Signature writing techniques Frank McCourt uses across their work.

The tense lock

He writes the childhood in the present tense and holds it there. The lock is the tool: a present-tense narrator cannot summarise, cannot say later I understood, cannot reach forward for the consoling sentence, so every insight has to be smuggled in as an event. Hindsight preaching becomes grammatically unavailable. The cost is high. You lose your best explanatory paragraphs, and you have to trust sequence and consequence to carry what they carried.

Speech without quotation marks

Dialogue in Angela's Ashes has no punctuation of its own, no marks, no dashes, nothing to fence it off. Speech is folded into the narration, so the reader receives a nun's instruction and a description of the ward in one uninterrupted movement, and the child's inability to hold the two apart becomes the reader's experience too. Typography is doing characterisation. The difficulty is attribution: without he said you have to make each speaker identifiable by idiom alone, which means knowing how your mother's sentences differ from your uncle's before you write either of them.

The institutional phrase as chorus

Certain phrases from church and school recur until they behave like a chorus, and the reader learns the rules of Limerick without being told any of them. Confraternity, state of grace, the dole: the vocabulary arrives from outside the boy and settles in his mouth without a gloss. Authority becomes audible as repetition. Keeping it alive takes work, because the same line has to land as comedy early and as threat later, which only happens if the scene around it has moved while the phrase has not.

Shame staged as behaviour

Shame appears in these books as something people do. Frank goes to school in shoes his father has patched with a strip of old tyre, and the laughing is the scene. The word itself stays out. Attenberg calls this writing into the shame, and McCourt does it at the level of gesture rather than confession. The prerequisite is a clear power map. The gestures read as theatre unless the reader already knows who is permitted to shame whom, and what it costs to be the one who ducks.

The one-word landing

After a long accumulation he stops on almost nothing. Angela's Ashes ends on a single word of dialogue, the word that became the title of the next book, and it holds because everything behind it has earned the silence after it. Scale it down and the same device works inside a single paragraph, or at the end of a chapter. Build the run, then land. What makes it hard is that the short line has to sound inevitable rather than clever, so it usually means deleting the better sentence you wrote and keeping the plainer one.

Money as the unit of measure

Everything in Limerick is priced. The dole, the pint that takes it, a shilling, the loaf, the pawn ticket, the tip for a telegram delivered: McCourt keeps the sums in view and lets them do what a paragraph about class cannot. Late in the book he works for Mrs Finucane writing threatening letters to her debtors, and when she dies he throws her ledger into the Shannon, which is a scene about money that is also a verdict on it. Numbers are checkable in a way feelings are not, and a reader who can check you will follow you further. Use them, and the reader stops needing your adjectives.

Literary Devices Frank McCourt Uses

Literary devices that define Frank McCourt's style.

Dramatic irony

The narrator reports. You convict. Frank describes his father's night-time speeches about dying for Ireland as a boy would, with pride and confusion mixed, and the reader does the arithmetic about the wages that went into the pub before those speeches began. That arithmetic is the reading experience. The alternative, a retrospective paragraph explaining what the father was, ends the scene and starts an essay. Dramatic irony keeps the boy sincere, and the indictment happens in your head.

Skaz, the voice that sounds spoken

Skaz is the Russian term Lodge uses for first-person narration that imitates speech instead of writing, and Angela's Ashes is a clean modern case. Short broken units, slang repeated rather than varied, clauses arriving as they occur to the speaker: you listen to this book more than you read it, and the illusion of spontaneity is what makes it feel like testimony. The illusion is manufactured. Saunders puts the useful version of the claim: since all narration is misnarration, the skewed way a story is told is part of what the story knows. McCourt's skew is a boy who cannot see the system he describes, so the voice knows more than he does.

Litotes

Litotes is understatement used as a weapon. The figure is older than the novel. McCourt uses it where a memoirist is most tempted to reach for the big noun: the twins die and the sentences stay flat, the mother stands in line and the report gives you her posture rather than her feelings. Naming the emotion does the reader's work for her, and a reader who has been spared that work feels nothing. Leaving the word out forces you to build it, and the version you build out of a wet mattress and a queue is stronger than any adjective he could have supplied, because you made it and you cannot argue with it.

Motif with variation

A motif is a repeat with one thing changed. Kundera refuses the synonym on principle, and Hemingway's tolling of one repeated word is the same instinct. McCourt applies it to situations rather than to nouns. The pawn shop comes back. The father's promise comes back. Each return measures the distance travelled since the last one, and often the distance is nil, which is the most punishing information the structure can deliver. Repeat with no variation and you have monotony, so the shift has to be there, small, and the reader has to feel it before naming it.

Imitation Mistakes

Common imitation mistakes when copying Frank McCourt.

Copying the Irish idiom and calling it voice

The phrasing is the easiest thing to lift. It is also the least load-bearing part of the book. Sprinkle Irish idiom over your own material and you get costume, and a reader who suspects costume stops believing you. McCourt's idiom does a narrower job than imitators think: it marks the speaker's place in Limerick and the community he answers to. The architecture is elsewhere. Build the tense lock, the unmarked speech and the priced detail first, and let whatever regional sound belongs to your material show up on its own.

Laying misery down as a continuous grey

The material looks bleak, so the imitator makes the prose bleak throughout, and the tension dies on page two. Bleakness is a level, and a level cannot fall. McCourt keeps putting hope into the reader's hands so that he has something to take away: the father comes home with wages and the family eats, the post office takes the boy on to deliver telegrams, a girl in a hospital ward gives him a poem. Then it goes. The drop is only available to a writer who built something to drop from, which is why the funny scenes in Angela's Ashes are structural rather than relief.

Taking the present tense without taking the vocabulary

This is the failure that looks closest to success, and it survives many drafts before anyone catches it. The tense is right, the scenes are in the moment, and then an adult's noun walks into the child's sentence and the apparatus collapses: I sensed the precariousness of our situation. A child does not have that word. The present tense only produces McCourt's effect while the narrator's vocabulary stays honestly restricted, because the whole effect sits in the distance between what the voice can name and what the reader can see. Read your draft for anachronistic abstraction. Each instance is a leak.

Attaching the lesson after the scene

Memoir writers assume the reader needs the meaning stated, so a reflective paragraph goes in and undoes the chapter. Two things break at once. The reader loses the job she was doing, and the narrator starts sounding superior to his own younger self, which is the tone that makes people put memoirs down. McCourt's insight arrives as consequence instead: what the boy pays for a thing, what keeps coming back, what gets placed beside what. If your realisation matters, find the action that proves it. A realisation no action can prove is not ready to be written.

Books

Explore Frank McCourt's books and discover the stories that shaped their writing style and voice.

Angela's Ashes
Angela's Ashes

Frequently Asked Questions

Common questions about Frank McCourt's writing style and techniques.

Why is Angela's Ashes written in the present tense?: Because the present tense narrows what the narrator can see. Le Guin's distinction is the useful one here: past-tense narration gives access to the time before and after a moment, and the present gives a small brightly lit field with nothing around it. That narrow field is the one a child occupies. The opening pages are the exception and they prove the rule, since they look back in the past tense at his parents in Brooklyn, and then the tense changes and stays changed once the childhood proper starts. The cost lands on McCourt throughout. Every insight has to be dramatised, since there is no narrator standing outside the scene who is allowed to state it.
Why does Frank McCourt write dialogue without quotation marks?: One marked line of speech would give the boy a defence he does not have. Speech and perception share one surface in Angela's Ashes, so what a priest says arrives already inside the child's head, unweighed and unsorted, which is where the irony lives. Look at what the choice costs him. Attribution has to be carried by idiom, and a scene with three speakers who sound alike collapses into noise, which is why the technique is worth borrowing only after your people talk differently.
How does the comedy in Angela's Ashes avoid trivialising the poverty?: The laugh is aimed upward. O'Connor's rule is the one to keep: the maximum amount of seriousness admits the maximum amount of comedy. Bakhtin's is that laughter brings an object close enough to finger, which is what McCourt does to the church, the school and the charity office. The joke lands on the institution or on the absurd rule, and the child keeps his dignity while the rule loses its. Timing is the other half. Comedy placed before the reader understands the stakes reads as flippancy, and comedy placed after the stakes are clear reads as survival, which is why the funniest passages tend to sit inside the worst scenes rather than between them.
What does Teacher Man teach that Angela's Ashes does not?: The narrator is now an adult, failing in public. McCourt opens in a classroom at McKee Vocational and Technical High School on Staten Island, where a boy throws a sandwich, and he picks it up off the floor and eats it in front of the class, and he reports the whole thing without once telling you how clever the move was. Same restraint, no child to hide behind. Later he sets his students to writing excuse notes from Adam and Eve to God, or from Judas, and the book lets that assignment carry its own argument about how writing gets taught. For a memoirist the lesson is portability. The tense lock and the withheld verdict work on last Tuesday as well as they work on a childhood in Limerick.
What can writers learn from Frank McCourt's use of repetition?: Each return carries one change. The dole queue, the walk to the St Vincent de Paul for a docket, the same phrase out of the Confraternity: they come back through the book, and what has moved between appearances is the boy's standing, so the repetition reports on him rather than on itself. Le Guin's caution is the useful test here, and it applies to any memoirist looking for a shape. Structural repetition works when the pattern was already in the life, and it cheats when unlike events are forced into a shape, which a reader detects faster than most writers expect. Look for the return that happened without you. Then put it on the page as often as it happened.
Can you use his method if your own childhood was ordinary?: Yes, and the ordinary case is the better test. What generates the effect is the gap between a narrator's vocabulary and a reader's understanding, and that gap does not require hunger. It requires a narrator honestly unable to see the whole of his own situation. A dull suburb works. Put a child in it who cannot name what the adults are doing to each other, price everything the way McCourt prices a loaf and a pint, keep the tense in the present, and take out the paragraph where you explain. What remains will be small and specific, which is the register McCourt worked in for three books. He did it with a wet mattress and a shilling.

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