I should have adored this - I have loved all of Betty Macdonald's other books and I've been saving this one up as a treat. But it just didn't do it for me. There seemed much more mean-spiritness than in her other books. Of course her spikey, pointed observations are what make her writing so delightful, but barbed humour only works well when one delights in the shafts because they're aimed at a shared and justified target. And here I found myself completely out of harmony with her. There's the obvious atrocious racism - I'll pass over that because it's been said many times before that it's a serious flaw, possibly an unforgiveable flaw in the book (though I found interesting the idea that what she was really objecting to was the sexism). What I disliked as much as the racism, though, was the harping on about the filthiness and unappealing qualities of almost every local person she encountered. This woman has serious dirt issues, in that the whole subject terrifies her and that means we part company (I have an active dislike of obsessing over cleanliness and think a tidy house is often the sign of a bored mind). If someone has the courtesy to bring me a whole side of perfectly cooked smoked salmon, and cuts me a slice, the last thing I'm going to be writing about is how the sight of his hands revolted me: I will be enthusing about the qualities of sharing and community. BM can't stop mentioning everyone's filthy appearance, grubby, messy yards and unattractive children. She meets a woman on the shore who says it was such a nice day, she had to leave the housework and bring her children out to clam dig. Instead of being pleased to find a kindred spirit, BM immediately sets in to comment on the woman's dusty braids, holey trousers, filthy children who are all 'drooling idiots' (*really* offensive). I just found it so unpleasant - this is a farming community for heaven's sake: of course people have dirty clothes. I suppose in the end all I'm saying is her schtick isn't mine and I found the book sneery. I also get irritated by people who don't raise objections or negotiate with their partners when things seem unfair but then do that passive aggressive thing of letting everyone around know what a tough time they're having. I don't blame her for moaning about the farming - anyone would - but she makes sure we know every time her husband fails her in some way or forces her to do something she doesn't want. Either support him or ship out, I'd say (and I gather she shipped out, which seemed a very good idea to me). I wonder if part of the success of this book is that it taps into the American pioneer dream in a way that brings it closer for your average city type ie sassy, snappy city girl used to all mod cons takes on Ma Ingalls' role and gives us her sharp-eyed take on it? It clearly is a long-time favourite of many readers. Well, I'm not American, I don't obsess over hygiene and I live in a rural community where acceptance and warmth is an important part of getting along, and clearly none of those things helped. I wonder if I like the Plague and I so much because, being set in the sterile conditions of a hospital, it was not possible for BM to get bitchy over dirt? But I also think in that, and in Onions in the Stew she finds a happier balance of enjoying the eccentric types around her and finding common ground with some, while also mercilessly skewering pretension and meanness. Here, too many of her targets seemed deserving of a little more understanding. I did like the mountains, I must say, and the descriptions of the food (but oh, how she rubbed in it that SHE was a gourmet and everyone else ate atrociously).
Simcha Fisher back in May posted an article on LOL Books and mentioned this book.The Egg and I by Betty MacDonald. One of my favorite memoirs. A lovestruck newlywed follows her husband to the largely unspoiled wilderness of Washington State, where they carve out a homestead and raise chickens, with backbreaking labor from dawn till dusk and beyond. You end up wanting to clobber her husband, but the story is completely engrossing. I guess I have a soft spot for someone who spends so much time just complaining about things — but oh man, what great stories, what crazy characters. (NB: She portrays native Americans in a way that many readers today will not be able to tolerate.)As I kid I fondly remember the movies based on this book and especially the characters of Ma and Pa Kettle. I hadn’t realized it was a semi-biographical story. This is often a very funny book as the author talks about her life growing up moving from city to city. At 20 she gets married to an older man who later decides to give up his current career for the life of the chicken farmer. Now this is not quite the Green Acres scenario with the city born wife with new farmer husband and resulting hijinks. Though it has echoes of that with Bob her husband being a fairly capable man being able to pull off life as a chicken farmer. Betty MacDonald though sees herself as less than capable and often bumbling in her adaptation as a farmers wife. She puts all the difficulties rather strikingly and very humorously. I especially enjoyed her relating the tales of “Stove” and the subsequent battles with the old wood cooking stove. In the mix of this she is also able to nicely relate the scenery around her and it brought up my own memories of the time I lived in Washington State while in the Navy.As in the movies the funniest characters are Ma and Pa Kettle, the next door neighbors as semi-hillbillies. Pa Kettle the lazy shift who is always trying to find somebody to do the work for him. As Simcha notes the portrayal of native Americans is quite stereotypical and off-putting. Though this was not the only aspect of the book I found off-putting. For me there was and underlying current of superiority as the author relates to the people around her. While Ma and Pa Kettle are rather sympathetic characters many people are simply “idiots” including her descriptions of her own relatives. This portrayal of the people around her took away some of my enjoyment of what was so often truly funny in the book. She came across to me a a bit of a jerk.When I looked up her Wikipedia entry after reading the book I was not greatly surprised to find that she had divorced her husband the chicken farmer and remarried. Though the book being written in 1945 there was some effort to hide her divorce. In the movie version the husband is named Bob MacDonald even though MacDonald is the last name of the man she later married.
A rare five stars for me! Not that there was a fantastic plot or anything- but the writing was amazing- witty, sharp, and fluid. Betty MacDonald's 1945 bestselling memoir of living on a chicken ranch in the coastal Washington mountains- it sounds at once idyllic and horrible. Her neighbors, the Kettles, were the inspiration for the movies I watched growing up in the fifties. The book itself also inspired a movie, which I will definitely have to check out. An excerpt, "I remember well how the night before I had been awakened by the taut stillness which presages mountain rain. I lay there in the thick dark, at once alert and unreasonably teetering on the edge of terror. No sound, no movement anywhere. Curtains poised in the middle of a sway, half in and half out the window. Shades gone limp. A trailer of my climbing rose clutching the window sill to keep from twitching. Breezes on tiptoe. Trees reaching. Trees bent listening. Everything in the mountains playing statue. Then the signal. Tap, tap. Tap, tap, tap. Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap. A great, soft sigh spread through the orchard, across the burn, over the mountains, everywhere. A frog croaked, the curtains bellied, a shade rattled, an owl hooted apologetically and the rain settled down to a steady hum."
—Jan
"Who, me?" I asked when we were moving and Bob pointed casually to a large chest of drawers and said, "Carry that into the bedroom.""Who else?" he snapped and my lower lip began to tremble because I knew now that I was just a wife."Who, me?" I asked incredulously as he handed me the reigns of an enormous horse which he had borrowed from a neighbor, and told me to drive it and a heaving sled of bark to the woodshed while he gathered up another load."Yes, you!" he roared. "And hurry!""Not me!" I screamed as he told me to put the chokers on the fir trees and to shout directions for the pulling as he drove the team when we cleared out the orchard. "Yes, you! I'm sure you're not competent but you're the best help I can get at present," and Bob laughed callously....And that's the way it went that first spring and summer. I alternated between delirious happiness and black despair. I was willing but pitifully unskilled. "If only I had studied carpentry or mule skinning instead of ballet," I wailed as I teetered on the ridgepole of the chicken house pounding my already mashed thumbs..."That from an 18yr old newly-wed. No doubt! Oh I laughed. Betty has a very wry sense of humour. She says a lot about her marriage without saying it. Loved this book. With the exception of chapter 16. Skip that chapter - trust me.
—Sylvester
A memoir of rural life that lit up the best-seller lists in 1945, The Egg and I is the story of a young bride in the late 1920s who gets dragged to the woods of Washington by her enthusiastic and unsympathetic husband. Like Shirley Jackson's Life Among the Savages, which I just read, MacDonald's memoir captures the life of an overwhelmed housewife with a keen mind, a sharp sense of humor, and an unusual and subversive vision of her time. These were women who were trying to be good wives and mothers, but who didn't always like the role they were pushed into, and said so, wittily. Both writers let the darkness creep in at the edges of otherwise breezy stories, which give the books a poignancy one might not expect from the 'harried housewife' genre. MacDonald is a strong writer, who captures the sometimes creepy beauty of the Northwestern wilderness vividly. Her descriptions of the couple's hillbilly neighbors are funny, if a bit cruel at times. Particularly amusing are her horrified descriptions of the dull and unhealthy food (pork belly and boiled macaroni) her neighbors ate on a regular basis, despite their access to fabulous homegrown vegetables and wild foods. She was evidently far ahead of her time in regards to food: she writes descriptions of the bounty of their table that would make a modern foodie grown in hunger and jealousy. Wild mushrooms, fresh mussels, fresh oysters, fresh cream...Unfortunately, she was not ahead of her time in regard to her take on the local Native Americans: if anything, her descriptions, though intended to be humorous, are unusually mean-spirited. However, over time I have come to accept that works and ideas are best judged in the context of their time, and I'm pretty sure MacDonald would have had a different take (or at least had the good sense to keep her mouth shut) had she been writing today. Just as I have to grudgingly appreciate Jefferson for some of his ideas, if not all of them, I can't discount a sharp writer for espousing one view I don't agree with. Did I just compare Betty MacDonald to Thomas Jefferson? Yes I did.Anyway...a highly entertaining read if you can ignore that fatal flaw.
—Felisa Rosa
