Frank McCourt talks about teaching and his latest memoir

Frank McCourt might be smiling these days, but the darkness within keeps leaking out. After publishing two best-selling memoirs about growing up poor in Ireland and moving to America, McCourt has just issued a third, Teacher Man, which chronicles the three decades he spent in New York City schools, retiring from Manhattan's elite Stuyvesant High School in 1987.

"I once had the kids write each other's obituaries," says the 75-year-old author during an interview at his publisher's office, indulging a wicked giggle. "I called it getting even. They were vicious to each other. They had burnings and jumping out of windows and landing on wrought-iron railings."

It is stories like these that make Teacher Man (Fourth Estate, $50) such an unusual read, as McCourt freely admits that as an educator, he was making things up as he went along — giving teaching his own black and bleak spin.

"I knew I had to find my own way of teaching," McCourt says, his brogue still present. "I certainly couldn't be telling them about grammar or analysis or whatever."

So he told stories instead. On his first day of class, at McKee Technical and Vocational School in 1958, the young teacher learned to keep the students quiet by telling them about growing up poor in Ireland. Then he returned the favour by asking them to write down the best excuse note they could think of.

Nowadays creative writing classes call this work-shopping, but back then it was revolutionary, and McCourt was forever on the verge of getting fired.

"They didn't know I was working things out with them by answering those questions about growing up in Ireland."

It was not an easy time to be a teacher. When McCourt began work, New York was a tough place. Gangs squared off in rumbles that made West Side Story look like a Jazzercise video. "They were mean, and brutal: the racism, you wouldn't believe."

Even the Irish and Italians used to fight, he says. It wasn't just racial hatred in the air. "It was a fairly rigid society," McCourt remembers, "this was still post-World War II, Eisenhower was in office, the country was fairly prosperous, but there was this sense that the enemy was out there. And then Vietnam comes around. Those kids at McKee were the ones who were going to go off and come back in body bags; not the kids at Stuyvesant.

"And when you graduated from college, if you became a teacher you were exempt. So we had half a dozen teachers at Stuyvesant who were there only because of Vietnam. They were not particularly interested in teaching. And they were always complaining. They were in the best school in the city, and all they did was complain. I thought I was in heaven."

It took McCourt more than 10 years to get as far as Stuyvesant. In between he taught on Staten Island, made an aborted attempt at teaching college, got married and even tried to get a PhD at Trinity College in Dublin. All told, he figures he taught more than 10,000 students.

A large section of Teacher Man focuses on his years at McKee, when he was learning, and he and the students were on a similar plane.

Like them, he had always been an underdog, even after he came to America. He'd worked on the docks, as some of their fathers had, and taken his fair share of knocks. It wasn't hard for McCourt to imagine how they felt cooped up in school. "I understood what I would be like in that class. I hated school in Ireland."

McCourt knew he had to resort to desperate measures to reach certain kids. One, he recalls, probably had a developmental disability and wore his hoody everywhere. McCourt finally won him over by putting him in charge of a few thousand jars of paint in an art room. "And then he was off to Vietnam and I never heard from him again."

Thanks to his two memoirs, a Pulitzer Prize, the film version of his best-selling first memoir Angela's Ashes, and the fact that he still spends part of his time in New York, not all of McCourt's students have been lost to him through wars or time.

"Oh, I hear from them," he says, raised eyebrows suggesting a rather large volume of correspondence. "I meet them in the street. Some of them are sending me books and manuscripts. One of them works for Newsweek. Another, Susan Gilman, who was on the best-seller list, wrote a saucy memoir called Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress."

McCourt knows he is in part to blame — or to thank — for the explosion of memoirs, but he thinks culture was going in that direction before he began his second career aged 66.

"It's in the air. It was happening with daytime talk shows where you see these people on Jerry Springer, these pathetic people telling their stories. And now you see it with reality television. People want real-life stories."

As with so many best-selling memoirs, from Mary Karr's The Liar's Club to James Frey's A Million Little Pieces, there have been questions about the veracity of McCourt's memoirs. He shrugs them off .

"These books are my impression of what happened — and I cannot remember every conversation word for word, so I recreate some things to get the sense of how it felt then. It's a story."

McCourt, who has homes in New York and Roxbury, Connecticut, had actually begun Teacher Man as a novel. Then he returned to New York from Rome, where he had been working, and ran into Newsweek book critic Malcolm Jones on a city street.

"I said: 'Malcolm, I am trying to write this novel about teaching. But I am struggling, I can't decide whether it should be a novel or a memoir.' He yelled: 'Memoir!' So I went home and reverted to the memoir."

Getting recognised on the street is something McCourt is now quite accustomed to. He finds fame flattering, but it hasn't really turned his head the way one might think it could.

"I had all these brothers of mine in the bar business, on the Upper East Side, all these glamorous people coming in, having drinks, going out to after hours places and gambling — staying out all night. Movie stars and the like," he remembers.

He turned that life down so he could teach. "I didn't want to be looking back at that: a series of adventures in bars. On the last day of my teaching career, I was sitting in my apartment, having a glass of wine, thinking I'm glad I did it. That I had been somehow useful, that I had learned something."

McCourt knows that path is not for everybody. He recalls one of his least popular lessons at Stuyvesant was to ask students to imagine coming home from college to tell their parents they had decided to become a teacher.

"Oh, they were in an uproar over that one. There wouldn't be a parent in the world who would be pleased with that news."