Adept at hoodwinking welfare inspectors and defending her turf with a shotgun or bare fists, Helen is the book's most memorable character and clearly an object of love - but not necessarily of pride. MacDonald rarely puts a sentimental gloss on the poverty and bigotry of his upbringing. "We were all on food stamps," he recalls, "but all the jokes were about black people on welfare. We were living in the same apartments, eating the same welfare cheese, but we had someone to look down on. At least we weren't black."
In 1974, Southie asserted its anxious pride, reacting violently when Boston tried to integrate its public schools by bussing black students from Roxbury into Southie's classrooms. For eight-year-old MacDonald there was the sudden excitement of petrol bombs and riot squads. Southie was famous overnight and the picture of his brother, Kevin, stoning a school bus was beamed around the world as emblematic of America in its latest spasm of prejudice. He was too young to appreciate the irony of white youths rioting to their favourite music, the Isley Brothers.
Without excusing his neighbour's excesses, the writer now regards bussing as a set-up. "We all paid for the school committee's racism and intransigence," he says. "Secure in their safe lives and houses they pitted the poorest white and black neighbourhoods against each other. The result in our streets was lifelong bitterness, dropping out of school and a hatred of black people."
In 1990, MacDonald took the opposite route, deciding to work with community groups and victims of violence in the largely black and Hispanic neighbourhoods of Roxbury, Dorchester and Mattapan - and persuading Boston police to help him in organising a citywide gun buy-back programme.
"Working with the enemy I made some of the closest friends of my life," he laughs. MacDonald also discovered that "the enemy's" prejudices were mirror-images of his own and that even self-described liberals were not immune. "I've been in meetings with very progressive people who made the most bigoted statements about the Irish and Catholics. My neighbours in Southie just aren't as polite about their prejudices."
The neighbourhood proved this again when it objected to the Irish Lesbian and Gay Organisation marching in the Boston's St Patrick's Day Parade, a reaction which MacDonald tries to explain but not justify. "Look, we grew up with gay people, some of my mother's best friends were drag queens. They were protected because they were from Southie. But most of the people parading were middle-class outsiders making a point with our neighbourhood. Try being gay and marching through Roxbury."
Attempting to make sense of his family losses, MacDonald refers to a history dominated by America's twin demons: poverty and race. "I still think of myself as a poor person," he reflects, "but to talk about poverty in Irish-America is to put poor whites back to blackness, to a time when the Irish on Boston's census were actually listed as black."
Visiting certain nationalist areas in Northern Ireland recently, MacDonald was struck by the similarities between two communities he sees caught in a time warp. "The people I met looked just like my neighbours, down to the Adidas jogging suits," he laughs. "The shamrocks, the nationalist symbols were so familiar."
All Souls exposes the unsavoury Irish-American reality concealed by those symbols and has made its author a "poster boy for the white underclass". But Southie's reaction to a book consciously written "for people who don't read books" is equally revealing. MacDonald urged one angry resident to read the book before he drew conclusions, then quickly realised that the man didn't even know where to get a copy. "He'd never been inside a bookstore," he explains, "There aren't any in my neighbourhood."
All Souls: A Family Story From Southie is published by Beacon Press, Boston - www.beacon.org