"ONE lousy book. And now I'm the Mick of the Moment," Frank McCourt told an American television interviewer on Tuesday morning. McCourt had just received a Pulitzer Prize for his memoir Angela's Ashes and the reaction of this self-described "Megamick" was typically self-deprecating. "I learned the significance of my own insignificant life," he said on Wednesday, addressing a group of Long Island high school students.
It was an unlikely, yet appropriate, audience for the 66-year-old retired teacher whose literary ambitions have reportedly always been modest.
"The most he ever hoped for was to get a brief mention in the New York Times Book Review," explains Kevin Cullen, Ireland correspondent of the Boston Globe and a friend of McCourt's, "and now he has made more money in one year than he dreamed of for his lifetime".
Paperback and movie rights to Angela's Ashes were negotiated with record speed and, after 13 trips to press, the book had sold 366,000 copies by December 1996. Its omission from the 1996 National Book Awards finalists list outraged trade insiders who had tipped the McCourt as a strong contender for the non-fiction prize. The memoir subsequently won the National Book Critics' Circle Award.
By then early disappointments were forgotten, and Angela's Ashes had completed its metamorphosis from book to media phenomenon. Frank McCourt was suddenly everywhere - on CBS Sunday Morning from Limerick, on CBS Morning News- and on respectable television and radio talk shows all over the US. And suddenly every Irish person was being asked "Have you read Angela's Ashes? Was it really like that in Ireland?"
The question is irrelevant. "You cannot verify and you're not really supposed to," says Christopher Ricks, professor of English at Boston University and editor of TS. Eliot.
Inventions Of The March Hare. "Other areas of literature are clear. Fiction says it didn't happen. Biography says it did happen. But memoir occupies a curious hinterland."
One fact is undeniable. The hinterland of memoir is rapidly expanding. Crisis memoirs in particular are flooding the market and the more explicit the recollection of misery and abuse the higher the writer's advance and the publisher's profit.
The Kiss by Kathryn Harrison, for example, which is a detailed recollection of the author's love affair with her father, ranks eighth on a non-fiction best-seller list headed by Angela's Ashes. Earlier this week Frank McCourt appeared on an Author Guild panel with Ms Harrison in New York. Dominating what is mainly a women's genre and a women's market, the author now finds himself in often unfamiliar company.
"The public is certainly being bombarded by victimisation stories right now," says Michael Coffey, managing editor of Publisher's Weekly. "But what distinguishes Angela's Ashes within that genre is McCourt's deep affection for his tragic story. Instead of being accusative, he manages to extract joy and humour from the desperation." An appalling and, for many readers, alien experience was clearly universalised by that humour.
But McCourt's ironic perspective alone cannot explain the book's broad appeal. "It goes far deeper than that," says California-based psychiatrist Dr Garrett O'Connor. "It may be an intimate book but, like Ulysses, it has epic, spiritual proportions. Here is the son searching for his father . . . and the inexorable draining of the hope that his father may change ... the shame and humiliation of a family.
As a young physician in Dublin, Dr O'Connor witnessed poverty similar to that of the McCourts. "A family of 10 living in one room with no water, no toilet was common," he recalls. "But this book is not only an accurate depiction of such conditions, it is also a brilliant clinical portrait of an alcoholic. Frank's father is a nice man who inflicts great cruelty and hardship on his family. If you want to learn about the disease, read this book.
Not that McCourt's is the first to tempt literary exorcism of what is still regarded in the US as a typically Irish demon. A Drinking Life, Pete Hamill's 1994 memoir, was a powerful evocation of life in Brooklyn tenements that were "bound together by rivers of alcohol". Such chronicles of recovery have, not, however, traditionally appealed to Irish-America.
"Previous generations of immigrants preferred to forget about the bad times," says Robert Scally, director of Glucksman Ireland House at New York University. "Now, perhaps because of a new Irish self-confidence, there is eagerness to, read about, an experience common to many, especially when it is conveyed without self-pity.
Scally welcomes McCourt's memoir as an antidote to the Michael Flatleys - or Cells-in-Leather. At the same time he admits that such extravaganzas and the recent spate of Irish movies primed non-Irish Americans to respond to Angela's Ashes.
McCourt's yearning to reach New York also strikes a welcome note for Americans used to hearing the complaints rather than the gratitude of recent immigrants.
Critics of the book suggest other reasons for its success. "It's a simple, straightforward yarn, a genuine come-all-ye, and that's appealing," says Denis Donoghue, professor of English and American Letters at New York University. "There is also the current revulsion against high brow.
And that guarantees the success of this kind of poverty-chic book."
In the hardship stakes, Angela's Ashes certainly faces tough competition. Rural testimonies from the southern US, such as Gal: A True Life by Ruthie Bolton or Praying For Sheetrock by Mellisa Fay Greene, along with novels like Roadwalkers by Shirley Ann Grau, make the McCourt experience seem positively sunny. Yet even these relentlessly harrowing works have enjoyed national and international success.
The confessional genre has even created a peculiar inversion as writers from affluent backgrounds increasingly complain of prejudice. "If I were `poor white trash' living in a trailer park, with a broken marriage, people would be more willing to forgive me," Kathryn Harrison, author of The Kiss, recently commented in the Boston Globe. Frank McCourt does not share Ms Harrison's grievance. As the most popular memoirist in the US, with a sequel to Angela's Ashes already planned, he is greeted not with hostility but with the kind of adulation usually reserved for television celebrities.
"At a St Patrick's Day party, somebody mentioned that I knew Frank," Kevin Cullen recalls. "Suddenly I was mobbed by people who wanted to know what he was really like. It was bizarre. And he still finds it weird when people tell him `You're my hero'. His heroes are Studs Terkel and Jim Kemmy."
The acclaim for Angela's Ashes has created not just a hero for readers but a patron saint for memoir writers, many of whom feel that they have been dismissed as self-indulgent lightweights by the literary establishment. "Frank McCourt did what we all attempt, to extricate ourselves from the wounds of time and place, and his success validates that process, " says Richard Hoffman, author of Half The House, his account of being raped by a junior high school coach. Hoffman was disappointed, however, by McCourt's ironic detachment. "We're trained to recognise that tone as real literature but I wanted the book to get angry. Irony is only one band on the writer's dial."
In the sequel to Angela's Ashes Frank McCourt is, likely to change frequencies. He will, after all, be, writing about life in the Promised Land of the US.