Learning the Significance

I learned from the Writer's Almanac that today is the birthday of Frank McCourt, author of Angela's Ashes. I remember reading that book the first time and marveling at the pathos and the humor and that marvelous opener: 

"It was, of course, a miserable childhood: The happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood. People everywhere brag and whimper about the woes of their early years, but nothing can compare with the Irish version: the poverty; the shiftless loquacious alcoholic father; the pious defeated mother moaning by the fire; pompous priests; bullying schoolmasters; the English and all the terrible things they did to us for 800 long years."

Angela's Ashes was on the best seller list for three years, won a Pulitzer and sold four million copies in hardcover. McCourt is the patron saint of late bloomers. He wrote the book in his mid-sixties. 

Re-reading McCourt's obituary I came across this lovely anecdote. When speaking with high school students in New York in 1997, he said this about his book and the writing of it, something that should gladden the hearts of all those who labor with pen and keyboard, or the hearts of all of us, period. "I learned," he said, "the significance of my own insignificant life."