Angela's Ashes
Frank McCourt · 1996
McCourt's Pulitzer-winning account of a starving Limerick childhood is so funny it almost hides how harrowing it is. The voice — present-tense, unsentimental, Irish — turned a story about hunger and dead siblings into a book millions of people read for the joy of the telling.
The case against
Rain, hunger, the pub, a dead child, repeat. McCourt's loop of misery runs on charm, and the charm is also the problem: the lilting child voice aestheticizes deprivation until suffering becomes performance. Limerick contained people who remembered things differently, and the suspicion that the squalor was embroidered for the telling never quite washes out.
Memoir · the Pro canon
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
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