I knew Angela; did Frank McCourt?

Distance from our families often leads us to make friends, neighbors, and coworkers, into "fictive kin" - honorary sisters and brothers, aunts and uncles, sometimes even surrogate mothers and fathers. This notion of "fictive kin" leapt to mind as I was reading Angela's Ashes (Scribner), Frank McCourt's Pulitzer prize-winning memoir. As of October 26 it has been fifty-eight weeks on the New York Times's best-seller list - the nonfiction list, that is. As I finished the book, I wondered what McCourt was up to, replacing his real mother with a fictive one.

The tenor of McCourt's story of growing up poor first in Brooklyn, New York, and then in Limerick, Ireland, is foretold in his opening lines: "It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood." Delicious!

The sobering cast of characters immediately follows: "the shiftless loquacious alcoholic father; the pious defeated mother moaning by the fire; pompous priests; bullying schoolmasters; the English and the terrible things they did to us for eight hundred long years." This sardonic wit held the promise of facts to come.

And "the facts" is why I bought the book, hoping to learn more about Angela, the eponymous matriarch.

The reason I hoped to learn more was that I knew Angela McCourt. In one of those difficult periods of young motherhood, with a child energetic enough for four adults, I rejoiced when Mrs. McCourt, as she was called in our household, appeared at our apartment door two or three afternoons a week to give mother and child a reprieve. She was formidable; her mere physical and psychological presence said, "No nonsense." As I left the house, her young charge would follow me to the door screaming of abandonment, etc. She'd turn to me and say, "Don't worry." To him she'd give a look: This was not the sort of behavior that she'd put up with once this weak-Nelly mother was out of the house. She'd seen worse, she seemed to signal. And evidently she had.

Those who have read Angela's Ashes can imagine my surprise as the story unfolds. The take-charge woman of my memory turns out to be a weak-Nelly herself: weepy and fatalistic, she sits a passive witness to her fate, beginning with the choice of Malachy McCourt as a husband and moving on to the deaths of three of her seven children. While Malachy, as many reviewers have pointed out, occupies the emotional center of the story with his engaging tales of the Uprising and drunken marches and songs urging his children to die for Ireland, Angela is on the periphery, drawn to her hearth wreathed in clouds of cigarette smoke, seemingly as much a victim as her children of this feckless man who spends his pay on drink.

Who then is the real Angela McCourt? The passive mother of Angela's Ashes or Mrs. McCourt, the formidable lifesaver who tussled with a lively two-year old while I took refuge at the New York Public Library? Have I created a fictive grandmother?

Or has McCourt created a fictive mother? Is Angela's Ashes another example of the now-permeable border that allows fiction and nonfiction to cross over into the other's territory? The Kiss, Kathryn Harrison's scandalous memoir of father-daughter incest, appeared previously as a novel; and Sue Halper reports in the New York Review of Books (September 25, 1997) that she first read the opening chapters of the novel The Story of Junk by Linda Yablonsky as a twenty-page chapter in a nonfiction work.

Can memoirs truly be nonfiction? In what sense can these ego-generated stories be true? or factual? Autobiographies and biographies we expect to be grounded in fact, with dates, letters, and corroborating evidence. But the current spate of memoirs seems to call forth more storytelling than fact-checking. Since the author so often turns out to be the story's long-suffering hero or heroine (witness Mary Gordon's The Shadow Man), perhaps everyone else in the memoir is destined to end as "fictive kin."

In fact, Frank McCourt is a superb storyteller. He and his younger brother, also called Malachy, have toured with "A Couple of Blackguards," a dialogue about their childhoods in Limerick and Brooklyn. Brother Malachy is the most sharply drawn character in Angela's Ashes, the pearly-toothed, curly haired little fellow inching Frank from the spotlight with his sunny smile and sweet disposition. He himself is now working on a memoir, working title: "Monks Swimming." Perhaps yet another McCourt family and another Angela will emerge in his memoir. Or perhaps not.

For finally, it is possible that the Angela of Angela's Ashes and Mrs. McCourt are one and the same person, nothing fictive about her - simply a new woman once she got Frank out of the house. Indeed, my children's clearest memory of Mrs. McCourt is seeing the formidable woman wreathed in a cloud of cigarette smoke. The ashes are nonfiction - or so it seems.