SOURCE: "With Love and Squalor," in Washington Post Book World, September 29, 1996, pp. 1, 10.

[In the review below, King describes Angela's Ashes as "an instant classic of the genre—all the more remarkable for being the 66-year-old McCourt's first book."]

"When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I survived at all. 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."

It takes a tough reviewer to resist quoting this paragraph from the opening page of Angela's Ashes, and it takes a splendid writer to fulfill the promise of those lines. I am not that reviewer, but Frank McCourt is definitely that writer. This memoir is an instant classic of the genre—all the more remarkable for being the 66-year-old McCourt's first...