Humor In Angela's Ashes and The Liars' Club

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miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood." In fact, it seems as if the whole Irish world is weeping over its misery: "Above all, we were wet," he says, and bad Irish weather seems to permeate the book, which details a brutal and poignant childhood, where there was rarely enough food to eat, where a drunken father often spent his pay on alcohol, where three of Frank's siblings died, and where his proud and indomitable mother somehow held fast through it all.
Liars' Club opens with a singularity rather than a mythic overview: "My sharpest memory is of a single instant surrounded by dark." That frozen instant only unfolds over time-"it took three decades...to unfreeze"-so that we realize that seven-year-old Mary, nicknamed Pokey, has been raped by a neighbor and at that moment is being examined by the family doctor. And yet the details of this girl's upbringing in a swampy Texas town (which, like Ireland, ...

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