Michael Patrick MacDonald

The author recounts growing up in a poor Irish neighborhood, and remembers the four brothers he lost to violence.

A Family Story from Southie

All Souls

A NATIONAL BESTSELLER “All Souls is the written equivalent of an Irish wake, where revelers dance and sing the dead person’s praises. In that same style, the book leavens tragedy with dashes of humor but preserves the heartbreaking details.”—New York Times Book Review A breakaway bestseller since its first printing, All Souls takes us deep into Michael Patrick MacDonald’s Southie, the proudly insular neighborhood with the highest concentration of white poverty in America. Rocked by Whitey Bulger’s crime schemes and busing riots, MacDonald’s Southie is populated by sharply hewn characters. We meet Ma, Michael’s mini-skirted, accordian-playing, single mother who endures the deaths of four of her eleven children. And there are Michael’s older siblings Davey, sweet artist-dreamer; Kevin, child genius of scam; and Frankie, Golden Gloves boxer and neighborhood hero whose lives are high-wire acts played out in a world of poverty and pride. Nearly suffocated by his grief and his community’s code of silence, MacDonald tells his family story here with gritty but moving honesty. All Souls is heartbreaking testimony to lives lost too early, and the story of how a place so filled with pain could still be “the best place in the world.”

A Memoir of Roots and Rebellion

Easter Rising

An “alternately funny and heartbreaking” memoir of leaving—and finding—home, by the author of All Souls: A Family Story from Southie (Newsweek). In All Souls, Michael Patrick MacDonald told the story of the loss of four of his siblings to the violence, poverty, and gangsterism of Irish South Boston. In Easter Rising, he tells the story of how he got out. Desperate to avoid the “normal” life of Southie, Michael first reinvents himself in the burgeoning punk rock movement and the thrilling vortex of Johnny Rotten, Mission of Burma, and the Clash. At nineteen, he escapes further, to Paris and then London. Finally, out of money, he contacts his Irish immigrant grandfather—who offers a loan, but only if Michael will visit Ireland. It is on this reluctant journey to his ancestral land that Michael will find a chance at reconciliation—with his heritage, his neighborhood, and his family—and, ultimately, a way forward.

Michael Patrick MacDonald

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