Authors Like Frank McCourt

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Authors Like Frank McCourt

McCourt was sixty-six when his first book was published. He had been born in Brooklyn in 1930 to Irish immigrants, taken back to Limerick at four when the family could not survive the Depression in New York, left school at thirteen, saved the money to return to America delivering telegrams, worked the docks, served in Korea, got into New York University on the GI Bill and then taught in city public schools for twenty-seven years, the last sixteen at Stuyvesant High School. Then he wrote down the childhood, in the present tense and in the voice of the boy it happened to. Angela's Ashes (Scribner, 1996) opens by conceding that it was a miserable childhood and observing that the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. It won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, sold more than ten million copies, and Alan Parker filmed it in 1999. 'Tis (1999) covers New York and Teacher Man (2005) the classroom. He died in 2009, and in 2017 his family scattered his ashes in Limerick, as he had asked. The ten below cover the childhood, the Irish argument about it, and the objection.

By Lisanne Swart · 10 authors · Memoir · Limerick and New York · Pulitzer Prize 1997 · Updated September 2026

Quick answer

If you love Frank McCourt, the closest match is Mary Karr, whose The Liars' Club did the same thing in East Texas a year earlier and started the same boom. Tobias Wolff is the other founding memoir. For Ireland, Roddy Doyle writes the childhood in fiction, Nuala O'Faolain and Seamus Deane published their own versions in the very same year, and Malachy McCourt is his brother, telling it differently. Jeannette Walls is the descendant. And Edna O'Brien is the argument against the charm.

Every book by Frank McCourt →

Where to start if you loved Frank McCourt

If you want the closest match, read Mary Karr.

The Liars' Club. East Texas, a year earlier, and the same revolution.

If you want the technique in fiction, read Roddy Doyle.

Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha. A ten-year-old who understands about a third of it.

If you want the Irish book that did not perform, read Nuala O'Faolain.

Are You Somebody?. The same year, the same country, no charm offensive.

If you want the same family, read Malachy McCourt.

A Monk Swimming. His brother's version of the same rooms.

If you want the argument against him, read Edna O'Brien.

The Country Girls. Banned and burned, and telling the same truth.

If you want more memoir

My shelf has the rest.

10 authors like Frank McCourt

01
The same year, the same revolution · Closest match

Mary Karr

American · The Liars' Club (1995), Cherry (2000), Lit (2009)

The Liars' Club is a childhood in an East Texas refinery town with a hard-drinking father, a mother who married seven times and who was briefly institutionalised, and a family whose entertainment was telling stories about each other. It spent more than a year on the bestseller list, was a National Book Critics Circle finalist, and the New York Times later placed it fourth on its list of the fifty best memoirs of the past fifty years. She is a poet first and teaches memoir at Syracuse.

The other book that made the memoir the decade's form, published a year earlier. Both take a poor, chaotic, alcoholic household and refuse to write it as a lament, both are extremely funny about things that are not funny, and both trust the child's point of view to do the work an adult narrator would spoil. Karr is more compressed and more interested in the sentence; McCourt has the better story and the warmer heart. Read The Liars' Club next.

— Lisanne
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02
The other founding memoir

Tobias Wolff

American · This Boy's Life (1989), In Pharaoh's Army (1994)

This Boy's Life follows Wolff from ten to sixteen, driving west with his mother away from one bad man and into a marriage with a worse one in a small Washington town, forging his own school references to invent a version of himself that might get him out. It became a 1993 film with Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro. He taught for years at Syracuse and then at Stanford.

Published seven years before Angela's Ashes and the book that made it possible for a serious writer to hand in a childhood. Same materials — a stepfather or a father who cannot be relied on, poverty, a boy lying his way toward an exit — and the same decision to write the child's intelligence rather than the adult's hindsight. Wolff is cooler and more controlled. Read it after Karr.

— Lisanne
03
The same childhood, in fiction

Roddy Doyle

Irish · The Commitments (1987), Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha (1993), The Woman Who Walked into Doors (1996)

Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha is narrated by a ten-year-old boy in a Dublin suburb in 1968, entirely in his voice, as his parents' marriage comes apart in the next room and he understands about a third of it; it won the Booker Prize in 1993. The Commitments is a north Dublin soul band and was filmed by Alan Parker. The Woman Who Walked into Doors is narrated by a woman in an abusive marriage, and is not funny at all.

The nearest match for the technique, done in fiction three years earlier: a child narrator whose limited understanding is the whole instrument, so the reader assembles the disaster from what he reports without grasping. Doyle is a Dubliner writing the 1960s where McCourt is writing Limerick in the 1930s and 1940s, and his ear for how people actually speak is unmatched. Read Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha.

— Lisanne
04
The same year, the other great Irish memoir

Nuala O'Faolain

Irish · Are You Somebody? (1996), Almost There (2003)

Are You Somebody? began as an introduction to a collection of O'Faolain's Irish Times columns and became, at book length, an account of a Dublin childhood with nine children, an alcoholic mother and a journalist father who was largely absent, and of a woman in her fifties looking honestly at her own loneliness. It became an enormous bestseller in Ireland and then in America. She died in 2008.

Published in the same year as Angela's Ashes, out of much the same Ireland, and almost unknown outside it by comparison. The difference is that O'Faolain does not perform: there is no charm offensive, no comic set piece, and no forgiveness offered to anybody including herself. It is the harder and, for many Irish readers, the truer of the two books. Read it directly after McCourt.

— Lisanne
05
The same year, in Derry

Seamus Deane

Irish · Reading in the Dark (1996)

Reading in the Dark is a boy in Derry in the 1940s and 1950s working out what happened to an uncle who disappeared, in a family where the silence is deliberate and the answer involves an informer. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1996 and won the Guardian Fiction Prize. Deane was a poet, a professor of Irish studies at Notre Dame and the general editor of the Field Day anthology. He died in 2021.

The third great Irish childhood book of 1996, and the most literary of them. Deane uses the same instrument as McCourt and Doyle — the child who reports more than he understands — and puts it to work on political silence rather than poverty, in a household where the secret is what everybody has agreed not to say. If you found Angela's Ashes too warm, this is the cold version.

— Lisanne
06
The same family, another version

Malachy McCourt

Irish-American · A Monk Swimming (1998), Singing My Him Song (2000)

Frank's younger brother, the one the family always found the loud one: a saloon keeper, actor, radio host and eventual candidate for governor of New York, who published his own memoir two years after Angela's Ashes and made it a bestseller too. The title comes from a child's mishearing of the Hail Mary. The two brothers had earlier written and performed a cabaret show together called A Couple of Blaguards. He died in 2024.

The same Limerick, the same parents, the same rooms, remembered by somebody else — which is the most interesting thing you can put next to a memoir. Malachy is the showman where Frank is the watcher, and he covers the New York years at greater length and with considerably less shame. Read the two together and you have the best available demonstration that a memoir is a version rather than a record.

— Lisanne
07
The British working-class childhood

Alan Johnson

British · This Boy (2013), Please, Mister Postman (2014)

This Boy covers Johnson's childhood in a slum in Notting Hill in the 1950s: a father who left, a mother with a failing heart who died when he was twelve, and a sister of sixteen who persuaded the authorities to let her raise him rather than send them into care. He left school at fifteen, became a postman, then a union leader, then Home Secretary. It won the Orwell Prize and the Ondaatje Prize.

The English equivalent, and it is a good deal better written than a politician's memoir has any right to be. Same material — real poverty, an absent father, a mother worn out by it, a child who notices everything — and the same refusal of self-pity. Johnson is plainer than McCourt and has no comic persona to hide behind, and the sister at the centre of it is unforgettable.

— Lisanne
08
The American descendant

Jeannette Walls

American · The Glass Castle (2005), Half Broke Horses (2009)

The Glass Castle opens with Walls in a taxi on the way to a party in New York, spotting her mother going through a dumpster, and then returns to a childhood of moving between desert towns with a brilliant alcoholic father and a mother who considered domesticity a trap. It spent years on the bestseller lists and was filmed in 2017 with Brie Larson. She had been a gossip columnist and kept the childhood hidden for decades.

What Angela's Ashes and The Liars' Club made possible, a decade later. Same charismatic drinking father, same mother who will not apologise, same narrator who declines to hate either of them. Walls is more anecdotal and less interested in the prose, which is why it reads so fast. If you want the same story again and want it now, this is the one.

— Lisanne
09
Older than the genre · The book that opened it

Maya Angelou

American · I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969)

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings covers Angelou's childhood in Stamps, Arkansas, and St Louis in the 1930s: segregation, her grandmother's store, an assault at eight and the years of silence that followed, and the slow return of speech through books. It was nominated for a National Book Award and has been continuously in print, and continuously challenged in American schools, ever since. She published six further volumes of autobiography and died in 2014.

The book that established the whole form — a childhood of poverty and danger written as literature rather than as case study, in a voice that belongs to the child and a structure that belongs to a novelist. Everything on this page descends from it. Angelou also does what McCourt does best, which is to make a reader laugh in the middle of a chapter about something unbearable.

— Lisanne
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10
The argument against him

Edna O'Brien

Irish · The Country Girls (1960), Country Girl (2012), Girl (2019)

The Country Girls follows two girls out of a convent school and into Dublin, and was banned in Ireland on publication; copies were burned in her home parish and her own mother hid her copy. O'Brien wrote about Irish women's lives, sex and the Church for sixty years, published a memoir at eighty-one, and in her late eighties travelled to Nigeria to report the novel Girl, about the women abducted by Boko Haram. She died in 2024.

The measure against which McCourt's charm becomes visible as a strategy. O'Brien wrote the same country in the same decades with no comic performance, no forgiveness and no eye on the reader's affection, and Ireland punished her for it for thirty years while it made McCourt a national export. Both are telling the truth. Only one of them made it pleasant to hear, and it is worth asking what that cost.

— Lisanne

Frequently asked questions about authors like Frank McCourt

Who should I read if I love Frank McCourt?

Mary Karr is the closest — The Liars' Club appeared a year earlier and started the same boom — and Tobias Wolff is the other founding memoir. For Ireland: Roddy Doyle does the child narrator in fiction, and Nuala O'Faolain and Seamus Deane both published their own versions of an Irish childhood in 1996, the same year. Malachy McCourt is his brother and remembers it differently. Alan Johnson is the British working-class equivalent, Jeannette Walls the American descendant, and Maya Angelou the book the whole form comes from. Edna O'Brien is the argument against the charm.

Which Frank McCourt book should I start with?

Angela's Ashes (1996), obviously, and be aware that the sequels are much weaker. 'Tis (1999) covers his return to New York, the docks, the army and NYU, and has none of the first book's propulsion; Teacher Man (2005), on his twenty-seven years in New York classrooms, is the better of the two and is genuinely good on what teaching is actually like. If you only read one, read the first; if you read two, make the second Teacher Man.

Is Angela's Ashes accurate?

It was disputed from the start, particularly in Limerick, where many readers felt the city and its people had been unfairly drawn, and where some of the details were challenged by people who had been there. McCourt maintained it was his memory of his childhood rather than a civic history, which is the standard defence and a reasonable one. It is worth reading knowing that: a memoir is a version, and the fastest way to see that is to read his brother Malachy's account of the same house.

Why was he sixty-six when it was published?

Because he spent his working life teaching. He came back from Limerick at nineteen, worked the docks, was drafted for Korea, took a degree at New York University on the GI Bill in his late twenties, and then taught in New York public high schools for twenty-seven years, ending at Stuyvesant. He had been telling the stories aloud for decades, including in a cabaret show with his brother, and had made several false starts at writing them down. The book came out in 1996, and he lived to see it sell more than ten million copies.

Is the film worth watching?

Alan Parker's 1999 adaptation, with Emily Watson as Angela and Robert Carlyle as Malachy, is handsome, faithful and much heavier going than the book, for a structural reason: on the page, the child's voice supplies the comedy that makes the poverty bearable, and a camera cannot reproduce it. The result is a well-made film about deprivation without the counterweight. Read first.

What is the criticism of the book?

Two things. In Ireland, that it traded on a stage version of Irish misery for an American audience, and was unfair to a real city and to named neighbours. More broadly, that it launched the misery memoir as a commercial genre, and that a great deal of what followed was far worse. Neither objection is really about McCourt's prose, which is exact and very funny. Edna O'Brien and Nuala O'Faolain are the writers to read if you want the same country without the performance.

What happened to his ashes?

He asked to be scattered in Limerick, and said he wanted no funeral service or memorial — let them scatter the ashes over the Shannon and pollute the river. In July 2017, eight years after his death, his widow Ellen, his daughter Maggie and two grandsons came to Limerick and scattered some of them at two places in the city. There is a Frank McCourt Museum on Hartstonge Street, in the school he attended, and a stage musical of the book opened in Limerick and then Dublin in 2017.

What should I read after Angela's Ashes?

Mary Karr for the American twin, Roddy Doyle for the same child's-voice technique done in fiction, and Nuala O'Faolain for the Irish book published in the same year that did none of the charming. Then Malachy McCourt, because reading a sibling's account of the same childhood is the most useful thing anybody can do after finishing a memoir.

Nothing here was suggested by a machine. I picked these ten myself, and the reasons are on the page.

Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021. See more on her personal bookshelf.

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“The happy childhood is hardly worth your while.”

— Frank McCourt, Angela's Ashes, 1996.

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