For a while back there, he was in his own words 'the mick of the moment', a celebrity feted wherever he went except his native Limerick, where they wanted to strangle him. In those times, you would have been hard pressed to find someone who had not read Angela's Ashes.
Then he wrote the follow-up, 'Tis, and left you with the feeling that it was all a bit of a jape, a stirring of an Irish stew of misery, conflict, blarney, sex and redemption. And when someone with a clever agent wrote a story based on an imagined love affair between Jesus and Mary Magdalene, we forgot all about Frank McCourt.
Of course we shouldn't have, because McCourt's last book Teacher Man was his best. I will come back to that, but first there is the question of what it was about Angela's Ashes that struck such an immediate chord. Was it, I wonder, that Limerick in the '30s and '40s was little different from many of the suburbs of more fashionable cities in Britain and America and Australia? However much the world gasped at the bleakness of the back lanes of Limerick, were there elements in that poverty that were familiar?
Or was it the freshness of the writing, the cheeky almost offhand style, without whinging or self-pity? The voice was that of a storyteller, not a historian or a memoirist. The characters — vicious teachers, manipulative priests, the garrulous sentimental father and Woodbine-smoking mother — seemed as much like creations for a story as flesh and blood people.
Even his adolescent sexual self-discovery was a matter for a joke. 'I'm worn out from being the worst sinner in Limerick. I want to get rid of this sin and have rashers and eggs and no guilt, no torment ... but how can any priest give absolution to someone like me who delivers telegrams and ends up in a state of excitement on a green sofa with a girl dying of the galloping consumption?'
In 'Tis, he followed up with the story of his family in New York, and it is not surprising that the book does not reach the heights of the first one.
Perhaps it is the teacher in me that regards Teacher Man as his best book. Okay, the bits of smart aleckry are still there and the occasional exaggeration and the clever turns of phrase,