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Frank McCourt's memoir opens in October 1949 as 19-year-old Frank sailed from Cork, Ireland, aboard the freighter MS Irish Oak, bound for New York. On board, a priest from Los Angeles pressured Frank to charm wealthy Protestant horse breeders, but Frank was too self-conscious about his bad teeth and infected eyes to approach them. A disgraced sailor named Owen bonded with Frank over Dostoyevsky, giving him his first literary encouragement. Throughout the voyage, Frank was caught between anticipation of America and involuntary nostalgia for Limerick, the Irish city where he grew up in poverty.

With no contacts in New York, Frank traveled with the priest, who bought him his first hamburger and lemon meringue pie. They shared a room at the Hotel New Yorker, where small cultural blunders marked Frank's outsider status. That night, the priest got drunk and made a sexual advance. Frank fled. The next morning, the priest blamed Frank, handed over his suitcase, and departed for Virginia. Frank rented a tiny room from Mrs. Austin, a Swedish landlady who disparaged the Irish.

Through Democratic Party connections, Frank landed a job as a lobby houseman at the Biltmore Hotel, sweeping floors while glamorous college students gathered under the Biltmore clock. His chronic eye infection led to a misdiagnosis, and a doctor ordered his head shaved. Bald and humiliated, he was reassigned to banquet setup. He sent 10 dollars a week to his mother and survived on bananas. A visit to the Forty-second Street Library moved him nearly to tears, and the Main Reading Room became a lifelong refuge.

When the Korean War escalated, Frank was drafted. At Fort Dix, New Jersey, he endured 16 weeks of basic training. He earned the honor of colonel's orderly, the soldier chosen to serve the colonel personally, through an exceptionally clean rifle barrel. His friendship with Di Angelo, an Italian-American soldier punished for praising Chinese Communists, introduced Frank to independent thinking about religion. Master Sergeant Tole, a Black man who read Dostoyevsky, restored a three-day pass a petty corporal had confiscated.

Shipped to Germany, Frank trained dogs at a base in Lenggries, Bavaria, bonding with a German shepherd named Ivan before being reassigned to clerk school. On bimonthly laundry runs, his truck delivered to a military laundry at Dachau, the former Nazi concentration camp. His Jewish colleague Rappaport screamed and fled at the sight of the gate. Frank walked through alone, touched the open ovens, and said a prayer for the dead. On the return trip, Frank had a transactional sexual encounter with a starving refugee at a displaced persons' camp, paying with his cigarette and coffee rations. He felt deep shame.

Promoted to corporal, Frank took a furlough to Ireland. His mother, Angela, met him at the Limerick station but had not moved into the government house she had been given. Frank traveled north to see his grandmother and his father, who greeted him with vague pleasantries. When an aunt blamed Angela's alleged affair with a cousin for driving his father to drink, Frank erupted and walked out. He never saw his grandmother again.

After discharge, Frank returned to New York and took a warehouse job, befriending Horace, the sole Black worker on the platform, who became a father figure. They nearly died together in a fumigation room. Frank briefly took an office job but quit, unable to sustain his lie about having a high school diploma. Walking through Greenwich Village, he saw New York University (NYU) and applied. The Dean of Admissions granted him provisional enrollment on condition he maintained a B average. His first literature instructor mocked his essay on Jonathan Swift, but in Mr. Calitri's composition class, Frank wrote about his family's secondhand bed in Limerick. Calitri gave it an A and told Frank his impoverished past was his richest material, the first time anyone suggested his childhood could fuel his writing.

Alberta Small, a blonde from Rhode Island, entered Frank's life in a psychology class. Raised by her paternal grandmother after her parents' marriage collapsed, Alberta had her own abandonment wound. She told Frank she was "pinned" to Bob, a football player, signaling a serious but not formal commitment, yet began meeting Frank secretly. Their relationship was turbulent: Alberta broke up with Frank repeatedly over his drinking, and he walked the streets in despair during their separations.

In March 1958, Frank began teaching at McKee Vocational and Technical High School on Staten Island, hired in an emergency after the previous teacher walked out. On his first day, he was hungover and helpless as students threw sandwiches and ignored him. A breakthrough came when he discovered hundreds of uncorrected student compositions from the 1940s and read them aloud; students recognized the names of fathers and uncles who fought in World War II, and the room filled with tears. He later ordered copies of J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, which electrified his classes until parents complained and the principal confiscated them.

Frank and Alberta married at the Municipal Building in Manhattan in August 1961. Angela, who had arrived in New York with her youngest son, Alphie, clashed with her sons' American lives and grew increasingly isolated. Frank's father also attempted a visit, claiming sobriety, but arrived on the Queen Mary so drunk he had to be helped off the ship. After a night of drinking, he apparently tried to get into Angela's bed; she called the police, and he sailed back to Ireland.

Frank and Alberta's daughter, Margaret Ann, called Maggie, was born in 1971. Frank savored their mornings together, recognizing them as echoes of mornings he had shared with his own father by the fire in Limerick. The marriage deteriorated, and Frank left a week before Maggie's eighth birthday, aware he was repeating his father's abandonment. In 1972, he moved to Stuyvesant High School, where he abandoned conventional methods after students discovered he had never attended high school. He dropped his teaching guides and drew on his own storytelling instincts, connecting Bugs Bunny to Odysseus as fellow tricksters.

The memoir traces Angela's decline through the 1970s and 1980s as her emphysema worsened. In her final hospital stay, she asked Frank to bring a blue razor so a nurse could shave the chin hair caused by cortisone; he brought a white one, and she scolded him. Frank's brother Malachy called at three in the morning with the news of her death. Frank sat in bed making tea, feeling not grief but a sensation of being "a child cheated" (348). Before Angela's coffin, the brothers linked arms and sang her favorite songs while bewildered visitors looked on.

In January 1985, Frank's father died at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Belfast. Kneeling by the coffin, Frank was seized by uncontrollable laughter at the shrunken body in a fancy suit. He returned alone, recalled the mornings by the fire, and said three Hail Marys. The father was buried on a hill overlooking the city; as the priest sprinkled holy water, shots rang out below. Three Irish Republican Army (IRA) men had been killed at a barricade, giving the father what McCourt calls "the escort of his dreams." In August 1985, the family brought Angela's ashes to Mungret Abbey outside Limerick, dipping their fingers into the tin urn and sprinkling her remains over the graves of her relations. They said a Hail Mary but felt it was not enough for a woman once known as a grand dancer who sang a good song, if she could only catch her breath.