Recommendations
Books Like Angela's Ashes
Best books to read after Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt
Angela's Ashes insists on the specific texture of poverty — its smells and rituals and blackest humor — as the proper subject of literature. These 8 books share its unsentimental affection for impoverished childhood, its complicated family relationships, and its faith that the writing itself constitutes a form of survival.
- 1Buy
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
by Betty Smith
Smith's 1943 novel about Francie Nolan growing up in poverty in Williamsburg, Brooklyn is the American parallel to Angela's Ashes: a working-class Irish Catholic family, a charming alcoholic father who cannot keep the family fed, a fiercely practical mother, and a child who escapes through reading — the same structure and the same love for the specific texture of poverty.
- 2Buy
The Glass Castle
by Jeannette Walls
Walls's 2005 memoir about growing up with nomadic and neglectful parents shares Angela's Ashes' central dynamic: a charming father whose inability to provide is experienced by his children as a form of love as well as a form of abandonment, and a retrospective understanding that the impoverished childhood was nevertheless a real one.
- 3Buy
Educated
by Tara Westover
Westover's 2018 memoir about escaping a survivalist Idaho childhood to a Cambridge PhD shares Angela's Ashes' central aspiration: a child in an extreme and limiting family situation who uses education as the mechanism of escape, and who must reckon with what that escape costs in terms of family loyalty and identity.
- 4Buy
The Liars' Club
by Mary Karr
Karr's 1995 memoir about growing up in a chaotic Texas family with a mentally ill mother and a father who told extravagant stories is one of the great American companion memoirs to Angela's Ashes — both books found a way to write about damaged and damaging childhoods with humor, affection, and clear-eyed honesty rather than self-pity.
- 5Buy
The Boy in the Striped Pajamas
by John Boyne
For readers drawn to Angela's Ashes as a historical portrait of mid-century European childhood poverty and its relationship to the larger political currents of the 1930s and 1940s, Colum McCann's TransAtlantic (2013) — which weaves Irish history from 1845 to 2011 through a series of linked stories — is the most important Irish literary companion to McCourt's memoir.
- 6Buy
Dubliners
by James Joyce
Joyce's 1914 story collection — fifteen stories about paralysis, failure, and the small dignities of Dublin life — is the foundational literary text behind Angela's Ashes: McCourt's Limerick is Joyce's Dublin a generation earlier, and the same Catholic guilt, the same provincial entrapment, and the same bittersweet relationship with Ireland and its stories permeate both books.
- 7Buy
How the García Girls Lost Their Accents
by Julia Alvarez
Alvarez's 1991 debut about four Dominican sisters navigating immigration and identity in New York shares Angela's Ashes' portrait of a family caught between cultures and the specific grief of children who grew up in one world and must negotiate their way into another.
- 8Buy
Hunger
by Roxane Gay
Gay's 2017 memoir about her body and her relationship to food — written with complete honesty about shame, trauma, and the desire for invisibility — shares Angela's Ashes' willingness to write about bodily deprivation and its relationship to identity without either sentimentalizing poverty or aestheticizing suffering.
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