Hungry Hill

A Memoir

By: Carole O'Malley Gaunt

Narrated by: Carole O'Malley Gaunt

Length: 12 hrs and 1 min

Publisher's summary

On a sweltering June night in 1959, Betty O'Malley died from lymphatic cancer, leaving behind an alcoholic husband and eight shell-shocked children—seven sons and one daughter, ranging in age from two to fifteen years. The daughter, Carole, was thirteen at the time. In this poignant memoir, she recalls in vivid detail the chaotic course of her family life over the next four years. The setting for the story is Hungry Hill, an Irish-Catholic working-class neighborhood in Springfield, Massachusetts. The author recounts her sad and turbulent story with remarkable clarity, humor, and insight, punctuating the narrative with occasional fictional scenes that allow the adult Carole to comment on her teenage experiences and to probe the impact of her mother's death and her father's alcoholism.

©2007 Carole O'Malley Gaunt (P)2024 University of Massachusetts Press

Critic reviews

"This book should be placed in time capsules in Springfield, Mass., and all across the country. It's more than a memoir. It's a social document, a story of a family, a document on the human heart. Since this is an Irish-American family the ingredients are almost predictable: nuns, priests, sacraments—and the battle with the bottle. What makes this book different is Carole Gaunt's wise prose. She writes with such compassion and understanding you'll look at your own family the same way."—Frank McCourt, author of Angela's Ashes and Teacher Man

"Hungry Hill is engaging and memorable. . . . One of the most endearing aspects of the book is its lack of guile and its feeling of authenticity—it glows with honesty."—Madeleine Blais, author of Uphill Walkers: Portrait of a Family

"Maybe the only thing stranger than the pain families inflict upon one another is the fact that one survives it. Carole Gaunt has made a beautiful story of all that, without a false note, a word wasted, or a flinch. One is grateful for this memoir and for the author who, as a child, kept her eyes open."—Roger Rosenblatt, author of Lapham Rising: A Novel