The Egg and I

The Egg and I

By: Betty Macdonald  

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Average Customer Rating: 4.5 out of 5

Publisher: Harper Paperbacks

Customer Review: 4 out of 5
Farm livin' is the life for meeee.... - "Green Acres" it ain't. I've read this book several times and each time was left limp as a rag from laughing. Betty MacDonald's saving grace was her self-deprecating, wicked sense of humor. She seemed to have a unique talent for lurching from one mess to the next while managing to laugh at herself. And her semi-real characters, the Hicks, the Kettles et.al. are priceless. (My personal favorite was Mary MacGregor who scooped a dead polecat out of the cream vat, squeezed every last drop of cream out of its fur, and sold the cream to the cheese factory while observing that "Just between us skunks, cream is cream.") Moving from a warm, chaotic family headed by a grandmother who wore her corsets upside down to a lonely outpost in the Pacific Northwest with a cold, unfeeling, emotionally detached husband who evidently wanted a maid instead of a wife must have been a wrench, but MacDonald managed to emerge more or less unbowed after four years. (We feel a lot better after learning -- although not in this book -- that she ultimately said enough is enough, took the kids and left the louse.)

There is one glaring hitch that makes me give this book four stars instead of five. MacDonald's sense of humor is delicious, but her blatant racism about native Americans verges on nauseating. Never mind that she formed close friendships with a black woman and an Asian woman in the TB sanatorium several years later; Strom Thurmond used to protest that "some of my best friends are colored". Racism is negative stereotypical attitudes directed toward an entire group, and MacDonald pulled no punches in describing her attitudes toward American Indians, especially those in the Pacific Northwest. This is MacDonald talking: "The Coast Indian is squat, bowlegged, swarthy, flat-faced, broad-nosed, dirty, diseased, ignorant, and tricky. There were few exceptions among the many we knew." She also said flat-out that she didn't like Indians (wow, who would have guessed?) and that the more she saw of them, the more she thought what an excellent thing it was that their country had been taken away from them. You can rationalize this any way you want, but there is no escaping the obvious: this is racism, pure and simple and ugly, and it runs like a poisoned creek through an otherwise hilariously entertaining book.

So the reader is warned. If you can get past the racist comments without retching, the book is one of the funniest you will ever read. I'm still cracking up visualizing Ma Kettle spitefully hanging up her rich sister's photograph in the outhouse.

Judy Lind

Customer Review: 5 out of 5
Laugh out loud funny! - One of my very favorite books. Laugh out loud funny. An honest and humorous look for of a couple who traded in the city life for one in the country. A true gem.

Customer Review: 4 out of 5
Still hilarious after all these decades! - It's amazing that the events detailed in "The Egg and I" happened about three-quarters of a century ago. Betty MacDonald's writing is still hilariously fresh and funny housewife-humor, written with the same dry sarcastic wit that Erma Bombeck used to deal with similar subjects during the 1960s and 70s. As a young girl fresh out of high school, Betty falls in love with an "older man", Bob, whose dream is to move to the country outside Seattle and operate a chicken ranch. In short order, Betty finds herself married to Bob and living on an isolated farm coping with herds of messy, annoying chickens, primitive kitchen appliances such as old-fashioned stoves and "sad irons" that barely work, and a host of colorful neighbors straight out of the old "Green Acres" TV show. Betty invented the mooching, lazy hillbilly characters of Ma and Pa Kettle and their family for this book and they became American archetypes with their own movie series.

Although the author based this book on her own experiences, this book is best enjoyed as what it's meant to be - ribald satirical fiction based on truth, rather than the absolute literal truth of what happened to Betty. It seems clear that there's an element of truth to the book, especially given that a number of her former neighbors claimed to recognize themselves and others in the portrayals and several of them even sued Betty after the book was originally published. However, Betty's writing style in this and her other books portrays most characters very flatly, as caricatures for entertainment value rather than as serious actors in a memoir. Also, as most people know by now, Betty did not have a great marriage with her husband Bob (this is only very subtly hinted at in the book) and she was also not as isolated as portrayed because her family had a farm nearby for at least part of the time covered by the book. Many of the experiences Betty recounts suggest that her life was probably in reality pretty lonely, boring and difficult and that laughing at it or making a joke out of it was a good way of coping with it. Betty herself is interesting because on the one hand, she seems to be constantly belittling herself for her lack of skills at cooking, cleaning and "fancywork" that the other farm wives perform with ease, and on the other hand she seems to consider herself a cut above all these country people because she is more educated and would prefer some more sophisticated entertainments than the local country dance (involving drunks, brawls and a hyperactive senior citizen lady determined to prove she's still young). The end of the book kind of peters out but I believe is meant to suggest to the reader, without actually stating, that Betty did decide to leave Bob and the farm life, a fact which is confirmed in her later books as well as by biographical information now available online.

Although parts of the book (such as the descriptions of the local Native Americans) would not be considered "politically correct" today, this is still one funny read and Betty MacDonald was one heckuva good writer.

Customer Review: 4 out of 5
Funny farm-life fodder - Even though my family members are fans of Betty MacDonald's Mrs. Piggle Wiggle books, we had no idea that she'd authored anything other than that fabulous character with her marvelous cures for what ails (mainly badly behaving) children. Only after trying to learn more about Mrs. MacDonald after chancing upon the supposed latest in the series (written almost entirely by a daughter), did I learn about this biography and several other stories about her life. Although Mrs. MacDonald was born in Colorado in 1908, her family lived in several different states due to her father's occupation as a mining engineer. After she and her first husband, Robert "Bob" Hesket, married, they moved to a farm in the Olympic Peninsula without plumbing or electricity. The Egg and I covers about a year in the life of the newly wed chicken-farming couple: visits from friends (rare), nutty neighbors (prevalent), lots of hard work and a huge amount of humor. Considering what the couple had to go through to keep the farm running in pretty primitive conditions, the fact that her sense of humor held strong is amazing and admirable. The best is her self-deprecating humor; the worst, her racism against local Indians. She died of cancer at age 49. Also good: the ORIGINAL four Mrs. Piggle Wiggle books, all by Betty MacDonald; The Horizontal World by Debra Marquat; and The Good Rain by Timothy Egan.

Customer Review: 2 out of 5
Starts funny, but quickly becomes uncomfortable. - I don't know if people reading the book when it was first published knew the full story, but having read the introduction by Betty's daughter gave the book a different feel. Betty's first husband was an alcoholic and abusive. She left the marraige after 4 years. She never directly discusses these issues, but her unhappiness comes through in her observation about those around her. When her idealized view of what she imagined country life to be doesn't materialize she becomes bitter. I wondered if the people she knew read the book and were surprised at what Betty really thought of them. She obviously feels herself superior to all the local women since she is interested in reading more than doing handwork such as quilting and embroidery. Her descriptions of the people she meets are humerous until you realize that she is critical of every person she comes in contact with and she generalizes her low opinions to all members of the group. Mrs Kettle is fat and lazy and sloppy and Mrs Hicks is too prim and clean and efficient, so all of the local women are either stupid and lazy or obsessed with housework and drudgery. She meets a few Native Americans who drink too much, so all Native Americans are dirty alcoholics. No one ever meets with her approval and as the book goes on you feel that her humerous observations have become relentless mockery. Even when people are showing her kindness and generosity she can only find fault and mock them. I keep waiting for her to find the good in these people and find some kind of joy in her situation, but it doesn't happen. It may be the result of being isolated and coming to the realization that she had married too young to a man she really didn't know, apparently out of fear that no one would ever marry her which was a great concern for a teenager in the 1930's. She was out on a ranch in the mountains of Washington State with no electricity, no running water, no other comforts and expected to do the manual labor that women were expected to do. She hates chickens, which is not good for an egg rancher, hates canning, hates Nature, hates everything. The descriptions of the local scenery is vivid and stunning, but even then she feels intimidated and threatened by the mountains that surround her. Fortunately she had the courage to leave and find a life more suitable for her and her children and happiness in another marriage, but this book is the work of an unhappy woman who cannot take joy in anything around her.

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