This book aims to redress the critical neglect of Frank McCourt's life-writing, which has been dismissed all too frequently as misery memoir and deemed commercially driven or aesthetically and politically naive. It reassesses the life cycle of McCourt's work, investigating the experiences that shaped his desire to write and demonstrating a nuanced and multifaceted network of stimuli and references. This new approach reimagines McCourt's work as a series of complex constructions that are inherently performative in nature (including the multiple identities that he assigns himself) and draw...