Review: THE EGG AND I

Title: The Egg and I by Betty MacDonald

Beginning quote: 

Along with teaching us that lamb be cooked with garlic and that a lady never scratches her head or spits, my mother taught my sisters and me that it is a wife's bounden duty to see that her husband is happy in his work.

Friday56 quote: 

When the garden were finished and the orchard had been cleared and plowed, we started on the big chicken house.

Summary: Betty MacDonald's first memoir about her life as a farmer's wife and his most important helper (she wrote several other memoirs.) After marrying, Betty and her new husband bought a run-down farm on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State. The goal was to have an operational chicken farm, mainly for eggs. But life on a rural farm with no running water or electricity, a rundown house, barns full of animals, and orchards and beds of vegetables, meant there was never a moment to spare in the author's life. Published in 1945, The Egg and I was about life in the early 1930s. It was an instant hit and a movie was made of it in 1947 starring Claudette Colbert and Fred MacMurray.

Review: I selected The Egg and I from among the library kit offerings at our public library because it is set in Washington State where we live. Many of the older women in the club exclaimed that they had read the book, seen the movie, or were aware of the book or author because their parents read it. I thought I'd made a good choice. Then I read the book and I was mortified by the blatant racism in the book toward Native Americans. I realize that people had different sensibilities in the 1940s and so probably no one at the time thought anything of the denigration of Indigenous people, but this is 2024. I was shocked and sickened by it.

I attended book club last night ready to do battle, if necessary. But before I left for the meeting I found this article about the author and discovered a few pieces of information that made me soften my stance a tiny bit. (Seattle Times, Sept. 4, 2016) Of interest to me was learning Betty MacDonald's husband was an abusive alcoholic. She left him and they divorced in 1937 in the height of the Depression. Never in the book did she bad mouth her husband or mention his drinking but knowing this may explain her antipathy toward the "drunk Indians" not so much because of their race, but more because these were men who drank with her husband. I'm guessing about this. I don't know this for sure. It wasn't until she was married to another man that Betty started writing so this memoir is a look back on her life. She was one of the most popular humorists of the time and she had a way of looking at the reality of her life from an absurd, funny angle. Her life was super hard, it was the Depression after all, but she didn't write about the horrors of it in a way that made reader feel sorry for her. "Part of MacDonald’s tough humor derived from her credence in her family’s much-repeated motto, 'Don’t be a saddo.”"

I left book club with a greater appreciation of the book, though I will never tell anyone to read it, I was glad that our book club discussion went well while we all chewed on the topic of whether a book should be laid to rest as societies move forward toward a more equal view of everyone.

-Anne