So begins the luminous memoir of Frank McCourt, born in Depression-era Brooklyn to recent Irish immigrants and raised in the slums of Limerick. Ireland. Frank's mother, Angela, has no money to feed her children since Frank's father, Malachy, rarely works, and when he does he drinks his wages. Yet Malachy exasperating, irresponisble and beguiling does nurture in Frank an appetite for the one thing he can provide; a story, Frank lives for his father's tales of Cuchulain, who saved Ireland, and the Angel on the Seventh Step, who brings his mother babies.