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Overview
Malachy McCourt, bestselling author of A Monk Swimming, shares the extraordinary story of how he went from living the headlong and heedless life of a world-class drunk to becoming a sober, loving father and grandfather, still happily married after thirty-five years.
Bawdy and funny, naked and moving, told in the same inimitable voice that left readers all over the world wondering what happened next in A Monk Swimming, Singing My Him Song is "told with the frankness and honesty for which McCourt has become renowned" (New York Daily News).
Synopsis
"Read it and weep: They don't make lives like this anymore," hailed the Irish Voice of A Monk Swimming. Indeed, that exuberant self-portrait, which overflowed with both hilarious and bittersweet anecdotes, paid tribute to the joys of a freewheeling life—and made Malachy McCourt one of the world's most irresistible rascals.
When we last saw Malachy McCourt in 1963, he was lost, his family gone, his life in chaos. In Singing My Him Song, Malachy shares his new adventures and a career that took him to radio, television, movies, and politics. He meets Diana, the woman who has remained his wife and partner to this day. He battles and ultimately triumphs over the bottle. He explores a spirituality that leads him to become a real father and a real son; he was there for his children as they grew, and he was there for his mother, Angela, in her final days, in a way he couldn't have been before. And he confronts his own mortality when he is diagnosed with cancer in 1998. Darkly comic with his ever-inventive use of language, Singing My Him Song rounds out an uncommon life of "a master raconteur" (Houston Chronicle).
Philadelphia Inquirer
A rollicking good read that, as the Irish say, would make a dead man laugh.
Editorials
From Barnes & Noble
Devotees of the McCourt family's reminiscences can rejoice: Frank's younger brother Malachy continues the saga in Singing My Him Song, the follow-up to his bestselling A Monk Swimming. This moving new memoir follows McCourt as he rehabilitates himself from a life of drunken debauchery and remakes himself into a loving, sober (though, thankfully, no less entertaining) husband, father, media personality, and, of course, author.USA Today
...I found the audio version of Malachy McCourt's subsequent Singing My Him Song to be wonderful.San Francisco Chronicle
A highly entertaining book with some great moments.Boston Globe
You might want to give Malachy's work a good leaving alone unless you're willing to have others gawk at you as you laugh out loud at the world he offers up as well as the life he has lived, loaded down with fun.New York Times
Outrageous and comic.Philadelphia Inquirer
A rollicking good read that, as the Irish say, would make a dead man laugh.From The Critics
Until his brother Frank turned the family moniker into a brand name in the late 1990s, Malachy McCourt spent most of his life trying to parlay Irish bonhomie and a gift for the gab into something approaching a living. His latest memoir, unlike 1998's A Monk Swimming, has a more sober and contemplative tone. Here the maverick McCourt brother recounts years spent working as a professional barkeep in New York, playing a professional barkeep on a soap opera and turning both a Gotham talk-radio studio and a Chicago theater into, well, barrooms. Since a fondness for whiskey is an occupational hazard that comes with a lifelong career dispensing the bottle, McCourt tells his often sad tales of urban adventure and familial abandonment (both suffered and perpetuated) with the self-deprecating humility of someone with a long history of attending twelve-step programs. In the end, this memoir is an involving and funny story of an ordinary Irish lad with show-biz dreams and old-country demons. The bitter knowledge of failure is what gives this McCourt much of his wisdom and wit.—Chris Jones
Publishers Weekly
"If ever there was an unexamined life on this earth," says Malachy McCourt, "it was mine." No more. In this sequel to his memoir A Monk Swimming, McCourt examines his every itch and scratch. These confessions of "a recovering Catholic" are written with obvious anguish and great personal insight, but in public view the insights often become clich s: the mea culpa of a charming Irish alcoholic, womanizer and deadbeat dad who recounts, in an enchanting brogue, the violence, irresponsibility, self-righteousness and self-pity engendered by his childhood of poverty and despair. Though the abridgment lacks smooth transitions and the author has a habit of dropping his voice at the ends of lines, this will surely become a popular recording for most listeners. For McCourt knows how to tell a story, how to read his lyrical sentences and how to get the most out of his rich, sardonic humor. Based on the HarperCollins hardcover (Forecasts, Sept. 18). (Sept.) n Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.Library Journal
In his second memoir, actor and rogue McCourt overcomes alcoholism, cancer, family problems, and more, and in the end, admits to enjoying his tumultuous life. His "gift of the tongue" creates charming phrases, e.g., the "nattering insistent voice of alcoholism" made him "the man who gave good intentions a bad name." With Irish charm and humor his reading of these lively stories adds a dimension denied his popular printed books. Some profanity and a few criticisms of Catholicism will rankle the pious, as did the famed Angela's Ashes by his brother Frank. McCourt is his own person, from a whimsical Micawber dodging creditors to a liberal radio talk show host exposing corruption, especially Nixon's. Government investigators assumed he was an illegal immigrant (he was born in Brooklyn). Often unemployed, the author deplores this hazard most actors suffer. Warmly recommended for open-minded adults. Gordon Blackwell, Eastchester, NY Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.Tom Deignan
Malachy McCourt's new memoir Singing My Him Song picks up where his best seller A Monk Swimming left off. As the old saying goes, you'll laugh and you'll cry, right along with Malachy, as we follow the actor/raconteur from Hollywood to Broadway, as he boozes, befriends famous men, and bucks the system.—Irish America