Let's get a couple of things straight from the start. Michael Patrick MacDonald may have written a book about growing up poor and fatherless, one of 11 children, watching three of his brothers die. But he is not Boston's answer to Frank McCourt. And, despite the insistence of countless talk show hosts and magazine writers, he is not Irish. He is Irish-American.
More importantly, he grew up in the crucible of Irish-America, South Boston or, as the locals call it, Southie, a shamrock-encrusted enclave which defies current gentrification and remains one of urban America's more benighted districts.
The tough-looking, soft-spoken 33-year-old writer has learned to correct people politely but firmly. He has also learned to be careful since his newly published memoir, All Souls: A Family Story From Southie, earned him the enmity of some violent individuals. "Readings have been disrupted," he admits. "I've been threatened and some of those threats are serious. A lot of my neighbours have been re-traumatised by the book."
There is, for instance, the father of a boy whose violent death figures prominently in All Souls. The furious, distraught man has spent hours in the Boston offices of Beacon Press, the book's publisher, railing against MacDonald.
"I would be more afraid of his other son," the writer adds, "But he is in prison until 2006. He stabbed a guy in the heart and raped a cop's daughter."
In their eyes, MacDonald's revelations of drug abuse and drunkenness, suicide, violence, organised crime and welfare scams in Irish-America's heartland constitute the ultimate betrayal of Southie's code of loyalty and silence: You don't talk about your own. He lived by that code for years and his transgression is neither casual nor sensationalist.
MacDonald wrote All Souls partly as a memorial to his dead brothers but chiefly to explode the enduring myths about the neighbourhood he returned to in 1994 and still loves. "Growing up there we were taught that we were in the greatest - and safest - place in the world," the writer explains. "Deadly things happened in black ghettoes like Roxbury, not on our streets."
Like his neighbours, MacDonald was a believer until street violence escalated as gangsters, exploiting the "no snitches here" tradition, flooded Southie with drugs in the late 1970s.
The MacDonalds quickly became crime statistics. Kevin, a drug dealer working for Boston's notorious Whitey Bulger, was found hanged in his jail cell. Frankie, a young boxer, was shot dead while robbing an armoured car. Davey, a schizophrenic, jumped to his death from the MacDonalds' rooftop. Kathy, a teenage drug addict, was pushed off the same roof and permanently disabled. Steven, the youngest, was convicted at 13 of fatally shooting a friend, and later acquitted on appeal. "There are seven of us kids still alive," MacDonald writes, "and sometimes I'm not even sure if that's true."
He was the quiet, watchful one, increasingly worried about his family's survival in a housing project that often looked more like a war zone. Machetes and handguns were commonly used in domestic disputes and a stray bullet wounded his mother as she stood at the kitchen sink.
It took more than that, however, to neutralise Helen Murphy-MacDonald-King. An outrageous, accordion-playing, spike-heeled scrapper, Helen's hyphens were earned, not inherited. "The men were always startled to see eight kids climbing out of the woodwork bright and early to inspect their new dad," MacDonald writes of his mother's many consorts.