What’s a piece of media (book, movie, song) that changed how you see the world?

Weirdly the book that’s coming to mind is Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt, which came out in 1996 and won a Pulitzer. It seemed that everyone read it at the same time.

It’s a memoir of McCourt’s desperately impoverished childhood in Limerick, Ireland, after his family returned from Brooklyn. It follows young Frank navigating alcoholism, death, hunger, and humiliation, centered on his father’s chronic drunkenness and his resilient mother Angela.

McCourt was the same generation as my parents—born in the 1930s. Their parents were also poor Catholic immigrants, including some from Ireland to Brooklyn like McCourt.

I still think of that book when people talk about income inequality, tenements, an alcoholic father, or “food insecurity” (aka starvation) in a country of plenty.

I know they made a film out of it, but it’s the book that stayed with me.