Malachymccourt isn’t dead yet

MEMOIR

Malachymccourt is not a goner. Not yet, anyway, but he sees the writing on the funeral home wall. All six of his siblings — including brother Frank, the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Angela’s Ashes”— have died. Many good friends too. As “a member of a species that has a 100 percent mortality rate,” he knows that his final exit is just a little ways around the bend.

“In Ireland, they say we’re in the departure lounge,” says the 85-yearold actor, writer, onetime Green Party candidate for governor of New York and full-time Irish-american raconteur. Mccourt is on the phone from his home in Manhattan talking about his new book, “Death Need Not Be Fatal,” and the end of living is very much on his mind.

“I’m quite blasé about it,” he says of dying, and you can hear the smile in his lilting Irish accent as he explains how he talks about death with his family and friends. “I just tell them that I’m going to head off and that I’ll go to sleep. And I tell them don’t be expecting me to go to heaven and intercede for them. I have no hope of heaven nor fear of hell, so I’m all set.”

Raised Catholic, McCourt is now a devout atheist who’s ready to make the leap into the great unknown without worrying what it will bring. Perhaps death doesn’t scare him because he’s seen so much of it.

Born in Brooklyn, McCourt moved with his family to Limerick, Ireland, following the death of his baby sister, Margaretmary. He was just 3 at the time. By the time he was 10, his younger twin brothers, Eugene and Oliver, would also be dead. As would 11 other school pals between the ages of 6 and 10.

“It was common then,” he says. “Death was part of the deal.”

Mccourt skirted death, dropped out of school, returned to New York at age 20 andmoved on to drinking. He held many jobs along the way— coal shoveler, dishwasher, concrete inspector, longshoreman, actor, barkeep — but for decades boozing was his profession.

The alcohol fueled many nights of fun and games. Hewas acting on soap operas at the time and a regular guest on talk showswhere his stories were a hit and being liquored upwasn’t a problem. But the drinking also cost him relationships, helped wreck his first marriage, and kept him from addressing deeper, darker issues including anger at the Catholic Church and his father for leaving his family destitute in the slums of Limerick.

But when the pain cuts too sharp, Mccourt returns to the twin balms the Irish have relied on forever: laughter and song. A wake in book form, his new memoir, written with BrianmcDonald, is chock full of lyrics and verses from Mccourt’s favorite songs and poems as well as tales that may or may not be true, but are quite funny even when— maybe, especially when— they deal with death.

Mccourt has already written two rollicking memoirs, “Amonk Swimming” and “Singing Him My Song,” and so “Death Need Not Be Fatal” feels like the completion of an unholy trilogy. He’s catching up and setting the record straight. But more than anything, Mccourt conveys a sense of peace.