The Egg and I

by Betty MacDonald | Biographies & Memoirs |
ISBN: Global Overview for this book
Registered by Vasha of Ithaca, New York USA on 10/23/2010
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1 journaler for this copy...
Journal Entry 1 by Vasha from Ithaca, New York USA on Saturday, October 23, 2010
I read this last month and am only now getting around to journaling it.

Betty MacDonald grew up middle-class and urbanized, learning to play the piano, draw, and dance. She wished repeatedly for more practical skills after she married a man whose greatest dream was to start a chicken farm. But the social world she was plunged into after they moved to a remote area of the Pacific Northwest, during the 1930s, was an even greater shock.

This book seems to be something of an outgrowth of the letters MacDonald wrote home to her family -- the reading audience would certainly be more like them than like the farm's neighbors, who almost universally never read. She had two goals, one being to convey something of how hard her life was when having to work all day without "modern conveniences", which her family repeatedly failed to understand, still saying that they envied her being out in nature. (She says she became impatient with any fiction in which the heroine didn't work hard.) The second goal was to amuse with outrageous stories; I think this may have led her to be somewhat unfair to her neighbors (and not just the Indians, who she despised with naked racism). One neighbor in particular, however, gets both more page space and a more nuanced characterization: Mrs. Kettle, whose manner and life evoked first shock and unease in the author, and then a growing liking. Although she denies it, I think Betty MacDonald could even call Mrs. Kettle a friend.

MacDonald's whimsical, willfully comic way of writing might be offputting at times, but I do think some of her paragraphs where she personifies inanimate objects or the landscape are much better than merely cute. On the whole it is a good depiction of the author's mindset and what shaped it.

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