Performative Identity Formation in Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes: A Memoir

During an interview in December 1996, Frank McCourt spoke about the process of memory in relation to the composition of Angela's Ashes:

I've been writing in notebooks for forty years or so. I have notebooks filled with stuff about Limerick, about growing up there, catalogues, lists, snatches of conversation, things about my mother and father . . . and finally I had to write it.

(McNamara)

Certainly the process of assembly surrounding the telling of one's life story inevitably centers around the method one uses to remember one's past, and McCourt also notably emphasizes this reliance on memory in deciding to entitle his text not just Angela's Ashes but Angela's Ashes: A Memoir. In doing so, McCourt highlights the fact that his text is an account of his life in Ireland—an "autobiography," according to notable Irish intellectual R.F. Foster¹ —and one may make the claim, as does Paul Eakin in "Breaking the Rules: The Consequences of Self-Narration," that the term "autobiography" suggests a truthful account, fact based, and the true history of one's life. Eakin writes of the responsibility one has to truth when one decides to write an autobiography: "while we may well have the right to tell our life stories, we do so under constraints; we are governed by rules, and we can expect to be held accountable to others for breaking them. . .[t]elling the truth—this is surely the most familiar of the rules we associate with autobiographical discourse" (115). Eakin's study is interesting, however, because in it Eakin uses the terms "autobiography," "self-narration," and "the telling of one's life story" interchangeably, but I would like in this article to use Angela's Ashes to explore the possibility that the term "memoir" can carry with it far different connotations. It therefore, as I will discuss, becomes quite significant that McCourt chose to categorize his text as a "memoir."

Indeed, the marketing history of Angela's Ashes suggests McCourt was aware of the differences surrounding the many terms often employed to signify the telling of one's life. The volume was at first alternately identified as fiction and as autobiography, but by the time of publication, Angela's Ashes assumed its final category as "a memoir".² In choosing this term for his text, McCourt absolves himself of any accusation that his account may be "untrue" because the term "memoir," unlike the term "autobiography," can suggest subjectivity rather than objectivity. In other words, if McCourt's text were titled Angela's Ashes: An Autobiography, then the text would be vulnerable to criticism by those like Eakin that it is not true to facts since objective fact is ultimately what many like Eakin commonly expect from an autobiography. It is, however, logically flawed to call a memoir untrue because one cannot argue against the form or shape events may take in one's memory; I cannot say that the way one remembers something is not the way one remembers something. In deciding to call the text a "memoir," then, McCourt claims to be doing no more than providing readers with an account of his memory, and he therefore establishes the truth of his Irish experience for his audience immediately, right on the cover of his text.

McCourt's memoir, however, has an established history of being criticized as not truthful, and one runs into stumbling blocks when one talks about definitions or categories of any nature, especially those that are related to identity, specifically ethnic identity. In an article published in 1997 entitled "I knew Angela. Did Frank McCourt?," Margaret O'Brien Steinfels questions the veracity of McCourt's memoir. Angela McCourt used to babysit Steinfels' child, and according to Steinfels, McCourt got the story wrong. She writes, "As I finished the book [Angela's Ashes], I wondered what McCourt was up to, replacing his real mother with a fictive one . . . 'the facts' is why I bought the book, hoping to learn more about Angela, the eponymous matriarch" (7). Steinfels, this quotation seems to suggest, assumes...