Sometimes death has a way of coming in pairs. And so, on my break, I thought of that odd duo who died within a month of each, the singer Michael Jackson and the writer Frank McCourt.

What an unlikely pairing, in death, let alone in life: the King of Pop, an unknowable celebrity, and the craggy writer, an intimate stranger who charmed his way into the limelight.

Jackson's death came while I was visiting a friend in upstate New York. My friend's family was agog with the details of the singer's demise and a life that was being played out, over and over again, on the nation's TV screens.

This passing, it seemed, was a national drama, eclipsing the domestic dramas that were the real concerns: a crashed market crash, gutted retirement, cancelled health insurance, and failing health. (I was in the world of the American experiment where only the healthy — and the gainfully employed — could afford to be sick.)

On TV, Jackson seemed to be constantly moon walking, stepping backwards as if he were retreating in time.

And that's exactly what happened as his story was being told. Before our eyes, his face darkened and his nose broadened into the features of a youthful African-American adolescent, then back again to the wizened, surgical anomaly he had come to be when he died, age 50.

Author Frank McCourt, an intimate stranger. (Scribner/Associated Press)

Throughout the coverage, nobody on TV seemed to have a clue who this person really was. A man-child? A lost, self-made creature of androgynous sexuality? All we knew for sure was that had retreated into the obscure hell of American celebrity.

Pull up a stool

But if to his fans and worshippers Jackson was an unknowable celebrity, Frank McCourt, who died on July 19, at 78, was America's convivial confidante, hurled from an obscure life into the literary limelight.

McCourt was the modest Irish-American teacher who rose to fame with his memoir of his mother and his impoverished childhood, Angela's Ashes.

Born in Brooklyn, his family reversed the usual immigrant's route by returning to Ireland in the midst of the Depression.

What a taste of early failure: to give up tomorrow to return to yesterday's poverty, which was made even more dreadful back in Ireland.

His father, a romantic, yarn-spinning alcoholic, drank up the family money and finally abandoned them altogether.

His mother, Angela, raised Frank and his siblings, and begged in the streets of Limerick for food.

Their poverty was unspeakably wretched, so much so that Limerick's citizens were almost ashamed of McCourt later for his stunning fame.

Genius of intimacy

McCourt wrote Angela's Ashes in 13 months, after he retired from 30 years of teaching in New York's public schools. He was in his sixties.

In the weeks after his death, the airwaves were filled with interviews with him (he had written two other memoirs). And his charm was infectious.

He had learned to do what great talk-show guests do: he became the instant confidant of anybody who would hear him.

The more his interlocutors knew of him, the more he was appreciative and flattered.

Tom Ashbrook of NPR called him a "genius of storytelling." Our own Eleanor Wachtel announced the repeat of a "surprisingly" candid conversation (one McCourt readily supplied to all who asked).

He generously uploaded all the details of his life, his anger, the unrelenting poverty, all wrapped in fine Irish whimsy. He was not only a storytelling genius. He was a genius of intimacy.

Speaking confidentially

I listened to a cascade of these "encore" interviews. All seemed remarkably fresh, even as he retold many of the same stories.

Throughout his years of poverty and teaching and yearning to be a writer, he had come to know the machinery of his heart's desire.

In interviews, he admitted his seething anger. It was only in his fifties that he could confront it. He told one interviewer, "confidentially," that he was a slow learner.

McCourt taught his high school students the value of story, the more rambunctious the better. He discovered that the excuse notes his student forged were so inventive, so inspired, that he celebrated them as a genre of American literature.

Such invention delighted him. No student was ever late simply because an alarm clock failed to go off. Instead, an uncle died and crashed through the floor, blocking the door and sending the household into turmoil.

McCourt began to have his restless students write obituaries for teachers. Not one of them ever died a natural death; they all came to foul ends.

In this way, McCourt uncorked his students' creativity. On one program I heard, old students called in and saluted him, touching the heart of their old English teacher.

Not deprived enough

McCourt understood his parents had lived "wasted lives," but he even seemed to forgive his unspeakably, irresponsible father.

After all, his father was the first one to tell him stories of Irish heroes and martyrs. His students were so enchanted by these stories, they even envied him his plighted childhood.

This, McCourt found endlessly amusing: that the privileged should be jealous of those who had almost nothing. As he saw it, they felt "deprived because they were not deprived enough."

Still, one lesson became clear in almost every interview he gave: the value of imagination.

McCourt grew up literally in the streets of Limerick. He and his buds had no radio or TV. They had to amuse themselves.

At night he would sit on the edge of the stairs and listen to the adults talk. No matter how poor, these grown-ups told each other stories that were heartfelt, festive, dramatic accounts of their day.

So, in a sense, McCourt was lucky: he was no passive couch potato.

From the language of the streets, the kitchens, the stairwells, a world grew in his mind and came to encompass him.

Meanwhile, his students in New York, so much better off, lived their lives imbibing manufactured, media products but came to feel McCourt's life was the more authentic.

A fabulous irony, thought the once-poor immigrant.

Two deaths within a month of each other. A once child star and pop prince who believed himself a fractured Peter Pan and carved at his face, desperately trying to find the human being under all that tissue and all that fame.

And a craggy humane teacher who came to success very late, faced his demons squarely, and charmed the pants off his readers.