The Egg and I by Betty MacDonald

I first became familiar with Betty MacDonald through her children's books about the magical Mrs. Piggle Wiggle to whom desperate parents turn for help in curing their children of some of the terrible ills of childhood like selfishness, picky eating, refusal to take a bath, and so on. (I highly recommend them.) It wasn't until recently that I realized that MacDonald had ever written adult books. And not only that, but her books for adults were incredibly popular during their time. To her wider audience, MacDonald was more popular for The Egg and I than for her Mrs. Piggle Wiggle books. It sold over 1 million copies its first year in print.

The Egg and I was first published in 1945 and is an extremely funny memoir of MacDonald's life as the wife of a chicken farmer on the Olympic Peninsula of Washington state. MacDonald and her husband bought a neglected farm in the foothills of the Olympic mountains well before it was "citified" and logged and hooked up to the grid. They literally worked from dawn to dusk renovating it and turning it into a successful chicken ranch. They had no running water, no electricity, no contact with the larger outside world, aside from run-ins with wacky neighbors, threatening wildlife, and rain, rain, rain. Although a reader can easily imagine how terrible an experience this probably was a great deal of the time for MacDonald, who didn't realize what she was getting herself into, she depicts her life on the chicken ranch with great warmth and humor.

Readers in 2008 might be discomfited by her depictions of her Native American neighbors, but it's best not to allow her obvious fear of them to color our enjoyment of the book as a whole. This brings up a subject that could be a complicated blog post on its own, but I think it is important, when reading books from another era, to acknowledge how the sensibilities of the past are quite different from the sensibilities of the present. While not condoning the prejudices or biases of the writer, we can understand these writers to be products of their times and move forward from there.

I thorougly enjoyed the picture Betty MacDonald offered of the Olympic Peninsula and its people during the time she spent there. Even today the Peninsula is rather wild and sparsely inhabited, but compared to MacDonald's time, it is very, very tame. I love to imagine the forests that had not yet been logged very heavily and the large populations of bear, wolves, and other wildlife that still roamed the mountains. And I can't help but admire the doggedness with which MacDonald tried to make her difficult life on the farm in the wilderness work out the best that she could. I'm looking forward to reading more of her autobiographical books for adults...there are three more, but no more about chickens, and that's okay by me.