Frank McCourt's first book, Angela's Ashes, both engrossed and delighted the nation, a memoir that reads like the grittiest of fairy tales. McCourt tells the story of his childhood in the most vivid and troubling detail, a boy dragged through the coals of poverty, his father's alcoholism, his mother's inability to handle their situation, the hunger and sickness of life in Limerick. Despite a sharp humor, which, overlaying the difficult subject matter reads like a miracle, the trouble of McCourt's early life follows him to America, into adulthood, into his second memoir, 'Tis, then into his career, and into his most recent work, Teacher Man.

Long after McCourt's return to the United States as a young adult (since his departure at 4 years old), through college, his service in the U.S. Army, and his experience as a "tough little mick" on the loading docks of the Hudson river, his accent, his "brooding hangdog look," and his bad teeth--his Irishness--left him feeling alienated and apart.

In Teacher Man comes the resolution of what the first two books gave the impression of as two irreconcilable lives and identities.

As a teacher in the New York City public school system's vocational high schools, McCourt learns the only way to communicate with the tough, working-class American students is through honesty and transparency. He has to get them to trust him and he has to learn to trust them. So he tells them stories.

"My life saved my life," he writes.

Through Teacher Man, McCourt makes clear how a high school teacher could have published his first book at age 66 and have it become an immediate and critically acclaimed bestseller. We learn how he entertained quite possibly the most difficult audience, classrooms full of aggressively uninterested high school students, using the stories of his life, for a career spanning 30 years. McCourt essentially made a life out of memoir.

"I'm 27 years old, a new teacher, dipping into my past to satisfy these American teenagers, to keep them quiet and in their seats. I never thought my life would be so useful. Why would anyone want to know about my miserable life? Then I realize this is what my father did when he told us stories by the fire," McCourt writes in Teacher Man.

McCourt remembers his father telling him about traveling storytellers in Ireland, called seanachies, who passed on ancient Irish history and legend and in return were welcomed with a meal or a place to rest for the night.

McCourt integrated his own stories into the classroom not necessarily intending to preserve cultural memory, or to teach the snotty, spoiled American teenagers what it's like to suffer. As he describes it, he told the stories more out of necessity.

In Teacher Man, McCourt explains that "teenagers" didn't exist in Limerick during the years of his upbringing, that children went immediately from a difficult childhood into the workplace, with the responsibilities of adulthood, and then parenthood. He associates the state of adolescence with a culture of prosperity. And for this reason, the obstacle of relating with his students was a significant one.

For me they were creatures from another planet," McCourt tells Metro. "I didn't know anything about them. And they were rough, they weren't like nice teenagers in some suburban movie about the suburbs, they were tough kids in a vocational high school. And they were plumbers and electricians and auto mechanics who did not want to be in an English class or a history class, or anything like that, those other classes called art appreciation, they hated all that. They just wanted to go back to the shop and be active with their hands."

Telling stories was the only way McCourt could communicate with them at all. And where up until this point, in his work on the docks and through the process of getting his teaching license and finding a teaching position, his accent had been an obstacle, once in the classroom his accent was novel enough to give him an advantage. The Irish identity that had caused him so much trouble in America, that many of his Irish friends strove to abandon, was able to flourish in the context of the classroom. And it saved him.

"They were interested in the fact that I had a different kind of accent. So that meant I wasn't just another ordinary teacher. So they started asking me, partly out of curiosity and partly because they wanted to cut me off at the pass, stop me from talking about vocabulary or grammar or something like that. So it became a joke. And they'd start saying, 'So Mr. McCourt, what kind of sports you like playing,' and I'd say, 'We're talking about grammar here. And I know what you're up to,' and then we'd all laugh. And I'd tell them something about my background and I'd tell them about school, and I'd tell them about how teachers in Ireland beat the shit out of us because we didn't know the structure of an Irish sentence, that kind of thing. So I was able to bring it back to the subject, always very clever. I was so clever."

Keeping communication open and humor alive in the classroom enabled him to form a relationship with his students, but also allowed him to manage the stress of overcrowded classrooms full of students destined for lives as plumbers, mechanics and secretaries, who had no use or interest for poetry, grammar lessons or the structure of an essay.

"It's very positive," he notes. "It helps the teacher survive."

The humor sustained in McCourt's writing, and its contrast with the stark subject matter of his early life, is what many readers fell in love with reading Angela's Ashes. And for McCourt, the connection between humor and suffering makes perfect sense.

"Well I suppose you can find humor everywhere, but you find it particularly in institutions, like prisons, the army, hospitals, where things are so extreme you have to have a sense of humor," McCourt tells Metro. "The same thing applies to living and growing up in poverty as well--you have to have a sense of humor; if you grow all gloomy, you're dead. I even heard there was humor in concentrations camps, that the inmates in concentration camps would make fun of the guards and so on and even the condition, and joke about their clothes or their lack of clothes, and that kept them going till the minute they died. Kept us going too . . . You have to have it, otherwise you're suicidal. I know there are people who get through life with no humor whatsoever, but I don't know how they do it."

Initially McCourt's reliance on his stories for teaching was accompanied by acute doubt and self-criticism.

A passage in Teacher Man chronicles his discomfort. "I argue with myself, You're telling stories and you're supposed to be teaching. / I am teaching. Storytelling is teaching. / Storytelling is a waste of time. / I can't help it. I'm not good at lecturing. / You're a fraud. You're cheating our children. / They don't think so. / The poor kids don't know. / I'm a teacher in an American school telling stories of my school days in Ireland. It's a routine that softens them up in the unlikely event I might teach something solid from the curriculum."

McCourt eventually took ownership of his unique teaching style, his chronic memoirism, though he was never quite sure about the extent of its effectiveness. Still, he dismisses his own criticism for being possibly too self-indulgent by considering the use of his own life history as his right, because he lived it.

"There was my childhood, there was a transitional period when I came and went to school and worked and then became a teacher. There are stages of my life, and I look back and I use them. If you reach a certain age that I have, if you pass 65 you're lucky, or 70. Then if you have any desire to write or any skill, you use your past. That's all I do now, I look back and I exploit my past. That's what it's there for. That's why I was allowed to live this long. I mean I wouldn't want to just sit around, lookin' at the wall, or thinkin' about my ailments, or going out to the pharmacy to get the latest drug for the latest disease," says McCourt.

He uses the word "exploit" in discussing the way he uses his past in the classroom and in his books. And despite its negative connotation, he defends that description.

"That's what I do. Exploit, use it, manipulate it, whatever it is. Yeah, I exploit it, I twist the tone, and do whatever I want with it. It's mine."

Though all three of McCourt's memoirs seem to stack experience upon experience--shaped by awareness of cultural identity, degrees of assimilation, the advantages and disadvantages of feeling outside mainstream America--McCourt does not look at his own identity, of being Irish or being American, as a conscious choice.

"I never reflected on it that way. When I came to America I became more Irish than what I was in Ireland. Because people said, 'Oh, you're Irish,' and then I became aware of being Irish. Then you get older, as I have. And now I'm more and more interested in America and American history. So, I don't worry too much about identity like that. Sometimes people tell you, 'Do you think you're Irish or you think you're American,' and I just say, 'I'm a New Yorker. That's all.'"

And as for his writing style, McCourt talks about that with the same lack of self-awareness. His habit of leaping freely back and forth in time with little need for belabored transitions, the fluid manor in which he integrates various voices seamlessly into the narrative with the skill and liveliness of a crafty playwright ... McCourt claims not to have premeditated a thing. His first and most successful memoir, Angela's Ashes, had not even been intended for publication.

"I don't know, who knows what my style is," McCourt laughs heartily, almost exasperated at the thought of characterizing his writing. "It reflects temperament, and I don't think I'm capable of anything but simplicity. I'd like to write very elaborate and complicated sentences like William Faulkner, or Marcel Proust or people like that, but I'm not capable of it. Besides, as a teacher I was always preaching simplicity and clarity and being natural. In Ireland we were discouraged from being natural when we were writing. They threatened us if we wrote simple colloquial sentences. We had to write like Victorians, which is very artificial. So after all those years standing up to yak yak yak, talk talk talk, in the classroom, I think that's what came out of the pen."