More Optimism, Please

Winter returned to badger the optimists, but I know I must be resilient. "Resilience" is a word that landed on my desk in the late 90’s, when I worked in social services. It's a shiny concept that suddenly got credit for being the prime quality that helps kids survive tough childhoods. Resilience also seems to be the key to success in the writing field. To thrive, a writer must triumph over life’s hardships and survive the ordeals of the marketplace. Frank McCourt is a writer who did both with panache.

The early years of McCourt’s life were filled with sufficient illness, danger, and heartbreak to kill a child of lesser grit. He lost three siblings to disease and nearly died of typhoid fever himself before reaching adolescence. According to him, his hometown of Limerick was a place where dampness “created a cacophony of hacking coughs, bronchial rattles, asthmatic wheezes, consumptive creaks. It turned noses into fountains, lungs into bacterial sponges.” His father was an unrepentant alcoholic who drank up the family’s cash. Young Frank often resorted to stealing bread to help feed his hungry brothers and sisters.

When he reached the age of 19, McCourt moved from Ireland to New York City. After working in the hotel industry and completing a stint in the military, he eventually established himself as a public school teacher. Although McCourt taught writing for decades, scribbling his own work on the side, he did not publish the bestselling Angela’s Ashes until he had already retired from teaching.

I heard McCourt talk about his writing breakthrough when he visited Philadelphia to promote his second book,‘Tis. He was a hilarious public speaker, funniest when he described how his late in life success had inspired scores of old fogeys to leap out of their beds and begin writing memoirs. I got him to sign a book for me and couldn’t help noticing how all that hardship had left no trace of bitterness on his face. He was a truly resilient person whose long years of toil brought him prosperity, happiness, and a Pulitzer Prize at age 67.