In life people learn from their mistakes and sometimes, like Frank McCourt, from difficult moments which, although painful, can be of great benefit to their experiences. It shapes them into the people they are and brands them, leading them to achieve great things in life. Furthermore, their achievements are more remarkable than those whose childhoods were happy; they were marked by adversity and their drive to exceed and surpass expectations. A good life was not given to them, but rather earned. Frank McCourt in Angela's Ashes described the difficult times and pain in his life, pain that no person should have to endure. After losing his little sister Margaret and twin brothers Eugene and Oliver to illness and bad parenting, McCourt experienced terrible times himself. Regularly subjected to malnutrition and neglect, he fell ill with typhoid fever, spent weeks in hospital and a persistent, unrecognized eye infection that nearly blinded him. McCourt grew up learning the bad lessons of his life as a child. From his birth, McCourt was left in an environment where he had to learn everything on his own, the only thing he was taught was his religion, which, due to his hypocrisy, he would reject. Therefore, it may be reasonable to say that McCourt mentally matured faster than most boys his age, eventually becoming the true male figure of the family, his father being a hopelessly irresponsible alcoholic. As he grew up he learned to compensate, to help himself and his family with his father gone to England to work and drink away his earnings. By the time McCourt was eleven, he had already started earning money by reading to Mr. Timoney and later helping Mr. Hannon deliver coal. This was how McCourt learned to pursue his life's intentions, through hard work (and the occasional act of underhandedness). McCourt realized as a child that he could only rely on himself when he was denied acceptance into a secondary school and as an altar boy, both by his church. His mother then had some wise words for him when she said: You will never let anyone slam the door in your face again. Can you hear me? From that point on in McCourt's life, he never forgot those words. It was through this that he had come to understand that the only thing offered to him as help and comfort, his religion, the one that had rejected him not once, but twice, had no real intent in its mission to help the poor like him and he was alone.