anybody can do anything by betty macdonald

Betty credits Mary’s positive attitude with getting them through the hard years: With Mary’s ‘can do’ attitude, Betty was propelled into jobs and sent on dates, regardless of whether she possessed the skills necessary for the job or had anything in common with her date. Since childhood, Mary had been getting Betty in and out of situations. But she also had her sister, Mary, an eccentric and energetic finder of jobs and organizer of people. With two children to support, Betty was desperate for work as jobs became more and more scarce. She and her family-a mother, a brother, and three sisters, plus her two young girls-live in a “modest dwelling in a respectable neighborhood, near good schools and adequate for a normal family.” As the Depression goes on, they find much comfort in having that home and in having each other to rely on and commiserate with. Anybody Can Do Anything opens with her leaving the farm and her husband and making her way with her two children back to Seattle and the bosom of her family, just as the Depression begins. Despite the hilarity with which she described her time spent chicken farming, she was unhappy in her marriage and terribly lonely. Chronologically, this book takes place after her misadventures on a chicken ranch-the subject of Betty’s first book, The Egg and I-and before her account of a year spent in a tuberculosis sanatorium, recounted in The Plague and I (both of which are also available in audio from Post Hypnotic Press).

Anybody can do anything by betty macdonald