Anybody Can Do Anything by Betty MacDonald

I’ve really enjoyed that about these books. Yet through it all, Betty tells these tales with such humor. The there are her funny stories of going into debt and how she managed to get out of it. Sometimes the men hiring secretaries were looking for ladies with special skills, skills that Mary and Betty weren’t willing to take on in a hired position.

Her bosses could be a terror as well, acting like temperamental children with the power to fire people.

She often stretched the truth and in those cases where she lied, she did make an effort to get either herself or her sibling acquainted with the skill before reporting to work.Betty rarely had steady work either the position was temporary from the beginning or the business closed. Basically, she would claim that she or one of her siblings had the skills that whatever employer was looking for. Mary was somewhat of a genius at getting her siblings jobs. Basically, it’s all about Betty and Mary, and occasionally one of the other siblings, finding and keeping work during the Depression int eh 1930s in Seattle. I found these little stories more to my liking. For me, these were cute, quaint stories but didn’t interest me nearly as much as her other two books.The book then skips ahead several years to directly after Betty’s failed marriage and her coming home from the chicken farm to live with her mom and siblings, bringing her two toddling daughters. This book starts off with Betty’s earliest years and all those school-year pranks and hi-jinks her sister Mary organized. Her older sister Mary was always getting the younger kids to do what she wanted, either by trickery or by simply assuming they would do so and telling them all the reasons it’s in their best interest as well. This book is set after her tales of the chicken farm (captured in The Egg and I) and covers her various job fiascoes before and after her stint in a tuberculosis sanatorium (as told in The Plague and I).Betty is the second oldest child in a family of 4 daughters and 1 son. Betty MacDonald returns us to her humorous world, this time during the Great Depression in Seattle.

Anybody Can Do Anything by Betty MacDonald