"I remembered it because there was nothing else," said Frank McCourt, who vividly recounted his impoverished Irish childhood in "Angela's Ashes."

Although he always remembered his Irish childhood with affection and wrote about it with great feeling, Cary was based in England the rest of his life.

They envied me my miserable Irish childhood and wished (almost) they could be poor so they'd have something to write about.

"I want them to have an Irish childhood, to grow up with Irish accents," he said with a smile.

It goes back to my Irish childhood.

A lovely book about an Irish childhood, although indirectly responsible for a decade of misery memoirs: "No, Daddy, not there" etc.

Alice Taylor's Irish childhood, recalled in "To School Through the Fields," seems more remarkable as a publishing phenomenon than as a memoir.

If anyone had said, 'How would you like a story about a bleak Irish Catholic childhood?'

Later, Greg Ryan will sing about his Irish childhood, at the Warner Library in Tarrytown.

"Both, in their apparently different ways, turn Irish childhoods to very particular purposes and both exemplify narratives skewed through selective 'evidence,' and a maneuvered memory."