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Frank McCourt is an obvious role model for any writer, given the phenomenal four million copy sales record of his debut book, Angela's Ashes. For late-bloomers and aging writers filled with self doubt, however, he rates as nothing less than a real-life hero.

McCourt detailed the exhaustive hardships of his early life in Angela's Ashes. Malnutrition, poverty, and parental alcoholism piled on top of tragic loss, disease and the callous neglect of an indifferent society could easily crush anyone, but McCourt's spirit won out. In 368 pages of horror stories, readers cringed and cried at the cruelties that befell the young fellow. If you ever personally knew poverty, McCourt's account was guaranteed to send you to the pantry to nervously check your potato supply.

One heroic aspect of his writing is that all this is recounted not only expertly, but with tremendous wit. On the first page he remarks, "Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood."

Telling this disastrous tale with lively humor clearly reflects a triumph of the soul, but the path of McCourt's life shows still more resiliency. When the period covered in Angela's Ashes ended, a young adult McCourt arrived in America, broke and uneducated, having dropped out of school at 13.

Surmounting the rules, he managed to be admitted to college. He earned a Masters degree and eventually became a high school writing teacher. Quite an achievement, to be sure, but here's the remarkable part: nothing much happened for the next 30 years. Ok, McCourt might dispute that; surely quite a bit happened that mattered to him personally. Life went on, marriage, the birth of a child, a long teaching career in a difficult urban environment, but to the public, he settled into an essentially ordinary life.

After retirement, at the stage of life when many people curtail productivity, McCourt's dormant potential exploded into the effort that would immortalize him. The accumulation of decades of struggle never reduced him to accepting a fading life of "coulda-woulda-shoulda" regrets. McCourt told the world the story that had gestated inside him; the story that won the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 1997.

What does this mean in my life? It inspires me. It keeps me going and growing. I'll probably never meet Frank McCourt in real life. With his great success, he's now a celebrity, and certainly wealthy. I'm nobody, but I'm a nobody with my own story tinged with dysfunction, poverty and illness, complete with an interrupted education. In my deepest definition of myself, I am a writer, and always have been. A story has been growing inside of me, too. For decades, I let the baggage and the business of life tell me that I'd never be a writer. At present, I'm disabled and partially retired. Last year I began to write. I write small articles, and I earn a few paltry dollars here and there, but I keep writing and learning.

After looking at Frank McCourt's life, can any of us whine about being too old, too poor, and too underprivileged to write? McCourt is the hero who took away the excuses.

Learn more about this author, C. K. Patrick.
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