Betty MacDonald and I

FROM THE TIME I was 9 or 10, I have carried a spiral-bound notebook with me at all times. I wanted to be a writer, felt I probably already was a writer, and feared I would never be a writer. I was constantly looking for clues that would tell me someone like me, someone from Seattle, someone who was a girl, someone who was no one, might be able to write a book. A book that got published.

I realize now that what I was looking for was an influence. Influence is a message about what is possible, sent by book from one writer to another. Different writers are looking for different messages. As a child, I sought a simple message: This place is worth writing about.

Just as I was a nobody, Seattle at that time was a non-place in literature. This was the 1970s. Few nationally published authors were from Seattle. Whenever I encountered any writing at all about the Northwest, I fell upon it gratefully. I was happy to read anything that had blackberries and Puget Sound and Douglas firs and the names of the streets downtown. I read Richard Brautigan stories; Ken Kesey's "Sometimes a Great Notion," though I didn't even pretend to enjoy it; collections of columns by crabby old Seattle Post-Intelligencer newspapermen of the 1950s; poems by Carolyn Kizer. I read Tom Robbins and was embarrassed by the sex. I read Mary McCarthy's first memoir, but she seemed to hate the place.

And, eventually, I read Betty MacDonald. She had been there all along, on my own shelves, in the form of her familiar, tattered Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle books. Then, browsing my mother's shelves one summer afternoon, I came upon a grown-up book by MacDonald: "Anybody Can Do Anything."

I had seen it before but assumed it belonged to the dreary crop of self-help books that had mushroomed on my mother's shelves over the past few years. Bored enough, I picked it up — and found an enchanted world. Enchanted because it was exactly real. "Anybody Can Do Anything" is Betty MacDonald's story of how she and her family weathered the Depression in an old wood-frame house (not unlike my family's) in the University District (just a mile or two from where I lived). And though my historical circumstances were very different from hers, our shared geography was enough to make me think I was seeing my life reflected in her pages.

IT'S FUNNY to think of a time when Betty MacDonald's books were new to me. Over the years I would come to know them the way I knew houses in my own neighborhood — with a casual intimacy. MacDonald began writing toward the end of her short life, in the 1940s, when she had found happiness with her second husband on their blackberry-ridden acreage on Vashon Island.

Her first book was "The Egg and I," set in the 1920s. This chronicle of MacDonald's life on an Olympic Peninsula chicken farm with her first husband would become her most famous book, make her a fortune, and form the basis of a wildly successful 1947 film. This, putting aside her books for children, was followed by "The Plague and I," a surprisingly entertaining account of her stint in a tuberculosis sanatorium just north of Seattle. How she created a ripping yarn out of lying in bed for a year is one of life's mysteries. Next came "Anybody Can Do Anything." Finally she wrote "Onions in the Stew," about life on Vashon Island, which came in 1955, just three years before she succumbed to cancer at age 49.

But it was "Anybody Can Do Anything," with its scrappy, cheerful message of survival, which spoke most directly to me.

As the book opens and the Depression begins, MacDonald has been living on the chicken farm in damp exile from her real life in Seattle. Married at 20, she had followed her husband to the Olympic Peninsula so he could live his agrarian dream. Now she has reached her breaking point. In March, 1931, after four years, she recounts, "I wrote to my family and told them that I hated chickens, I was lonely and I seemed to have married the wrong man." She snatches up her little daughters and makes her long, difficult way back to the city.

There, she and her girls are folded happily back into her large family's bosom. That night, and always, she wrote, her mother's shabby house "with its broad, welcoming porch, dark woodwork, cluttered dining-room plate rail, large, fragrant kitchen, easy book-filled firelit living room, four elastic bedrooms . . . represents the ultimate in charm, warmth and luxury."

The book describes life there with her little girls, three sisters, brother and whoever else might be sleeping over. It also details the literally dozens of jobs that MacDonald held throughout the Depression: hapless secretary to businessmen of every stripe, fur-coat model, photo retoucher, rabbit rancher, firewood stealer, Christmas-tree decorator, baby-sitter, receptionist to a gangster.

The author jumps from job to job, with whole industries blowing up behind her as she leaves. She's hustled along in the ever-shrinking job market by her sister, Mary, who considers herself an "executive thinker."

Mary has a job ready for Betty as soon as she gets off the bus from the egg farm. Never mind that Betty is utterly unqualified. Mary is quick to admonish her sister: "There are plenty of jobs, but the trouble with most people, and I know because I'm always getting jobs for my friends, is that they stay home with the covers pulled up over their heads waiting for some employer to come creeping in looking for them."

The truth of this statement is disproved throughout the book. There were certainly not plenty of jobs. The portrait of Depression-era Seattle is definitively, though quietly, desperate. But on my first read, I hardly clocked the despair. I just thrilled to the evocation of my home, captured in such throwaway phrases as, "There was nothing in sight but wet pavement and wet sky." MacDonald describes places that I myself knew — the I. Magnin at the corner of Sixth and Pine, the palatial movie theater named the Neptune. Here she is on the Pike Place Market:

"The Public Market, about three blocks long, crowded and smelling deliciously of baking bread, roasting peanuts, coffee, fresh fish and bananas, blazed with the orange, reds, yellows and greens of fresh, succulent fruits and vegetables. From the hundreds of farmers stalls that lined both sides of the street and extended clear through the block on the east side, Italians, Greeks, Norwegians, Finns, Danes, Japanese and Germans offered their wares."

Such descriptions caused a strange firing in my brain. I was accustomed to imagining locations from books; there was a deep pleasure in having that necessity for once removed. Even the food they ate was the food we ate. For special treats, MacDonald tells of buying Dungeness crabs and Olympia oysters, just as my family did.

I saw, in the cold light of nonfiction, the possibility that Seattle might be the setting for a book. I would not be struck so thoroughly by the possibility of a true Northwest literature until I started reading Raymond Carver in the mid-1980s.

MY MOTHER told me that Betty MacDonald had died in the 1950s, but that her niece lived in our very own neighborhood. I walked by the house, gazing at it with a true feeling of awe: Of course, I knew authors were real people. But Betty MacDonald was more than real. She was prima facie evidence that the materials I had at hand — those trees, that rain — were enough.

Other writers came and went; Betty MacDonald endured for me. This was because she was funny. No, that's not quite right. Betty MacDonald was comic. As I became a writer myself, I studied her, trying to figure out just how she did it.

She wrote hilarious portraits of her bosses, who in her hands become one long parade of human oddity. She wrote fondly of her family's eccentricities. But above all, she wrote with unflagging self-abasement. Her books twanged with the idea that one's own ridiculousness was comedy enough. A good example:

"Until I started to night school, my life was one long sweep of mediocrity. While my family and friends were enjoying the distinction of being labeled the prettiest, most popular, best dancer, fastest runner, highest diver, longest breath-holder-under-water, best tennis player, most fearless, owner of the highest arches, tiniest, wittiest, most efficient, one with the most allergies or highest salaried, I had to learn to adjust to remarks such as, "My, Mary has the most beautiful red hair I've ever seen, it's just like burnished copper and so silky and curly — oh yes, Betty has hair, too, hasn't she? I guess it's being so coarse is what makes it look so thick."

Other types of memoirists value lyricism or shock tactics. Comic memoirists are utterly dependent on knowing that they themselves are the silliest people in any given room.

I know whereof I speak. Earlier this year I published a memoir about my own very, very ordinary life. Memoirists like me are writing what author Lorraine Adams has called "nobody" memoirs. As she said in a 2002 piece in the Washington Monthly, such memoirists are "neither generals, statesmen, celebrities, nor their kin."

How, then, to proceed? Your first order of business is to let readers know that you know that they know you're a nobody. So you must imply your unimportance as quickly as possible and never, ever stop.

In "Anybody Can Do Anything," MacDonald fails again and again. It's an entire book about failure: her own and the economy's. It's also about persisting in the face of one's shortcomings. What she wants is a job commensurate with her skills: "I had in mind sort of a combination janitress, slow typist and file clerk."

Finally, she washes up safely on the sandbar of government work, taking a job at the Seattle branch of the National Recovery Administration, the New Deal agency charged with organizing businesses under new fair-trade codes. "There were thousands of us who didn't know what we were doing but were all doing it in 10 copies."

MacDonald is rarely remembered for her wry tone. When she's remembered at all, she is preceded not by her own reputation but that of the big-screen version of "The Egg and I," starring Claudette Colbert and Fred MacMurray, which is pretty nearly unwatchable.

In the film, Ma and Pa Kettle — neighbors who are fondly, if broadly, drawn in the book — have been turned into tobacco-spitting, raccoon-roasting caricatures. And the public loved them. Ma and Pa Kettle proved so popular that nine more films were made about them and their fictional 15 children, and Betty MacDonald lost all hope of being taken seriously as a writer.

Many years after all of this, I was having dinner with a writer who had undertaken to write about the Northwest. "You have to be careful about using too much humor, otherwise you end up sounding like Betty MacDonald: housewife humor," he said, finishing in scathing tones. But MacDonald's writing, with its quiet irreverence, has more in common with, say, Calvin Trillin or Laurie Colwin, than it does with a midcentury housewife humorist like Erma Bombeck. (Though, really, what's so bad about Erma Bombeck?)

I teach adult writing students. When we work on memoir, they want to write pieces about what they've achieved. About their sterling qualities. "Nobody wants to hear about that except your mother!" I tell them. Which is never popular. Even so, I try to explain the Betty MacDonald principle to them: What people want to see in the memoir are reflections of their own failures and smallnesses. If you can show that, they will love you. Or at least accept you as a fellow nobody.

These simple things would be enough for me: a story of Seattle; a tale told with self-mocking humor. But what MacDonald achieves in "Anybody Can Do Anything" is something more: a finely observed journalistic record of her time.

What New York Times critic Bosley Crowther called the "earthy tang" of her writing does not seem like an indicator of serious journalism. But the details of home and work life accrue, anecdotes pile up, and suddenly the reader has a real sense of daily existence in the West during the 1930s.

Take, for example, MacDonald's account of one of her first jobs. In this chapter, eerily suggestive of the economic tenterhooks we've been on since 2007, she's been summarily fired as executive secretary to a miner. So the ever-resourceful Mary has found her a job at her own office, where she works for a lumber magnate. When Betty protests that she hasn't any of the qualifications the lumberman is looking for, Mary tells her not to fret. " 'You thought you couldn't learn mining . . . There's nothing to lumber, it's just a matter of being able to divide everything by 12.' "

As she makes her way to work each morning, MacDonald is nervous but glad of the work: "Now I grew more and more conscious of the aimlessness and sadness of the people on the streets, of the Space for Rent signs, marking the sudden death of businesses, that had sprung up over the city like white crosses on the battlefield, and I lifted myself up each morning timidly and with dread."

Her employer's business is clearly failing, but MacDonald feels she shouldn't leave her boss, Mr. Chalmers, in the lurch. She intends to stay until the end. "And I did," we read, "in spite of Mr. Chalmers' telling me many times that the Depression was all my fault, the direct result of inferior people like me wearing silk stockings and thinking they were as good as people like him." Again, this blame-the-victim language recalls some of the rhetoric of today's subprime mortgage crisis.

The author and her family soon lose their phone service, their electricity, their heat. Being Betty MacDonald, she makes it all sound rather jolly. She tells of endless bowls of vegetable soup eaten by candlelight. And when she complains about being broke, she does it with typical good humor: "There is no getting around the fact that being poor takes getting used to. You have to adjust to the fact that it's no longer a question of what you eat but if you eat."

Sometimes details tell the story that the tone masks. "When we ran out of fireplace wood, Mary unearthed a bucksaw and marched us all down to a city park two blocks away, where we took turns sawing up fallen logs." Despite her characteristic pluck, you feel straits getting uncomfortably dire.

This isn't social commentary sitting awkwardly atop a narrative; instead, it's tightly knitted to personal experience. When MacDonald notices that every day "found a little better class of people selling apples on street corners," she's not making an idle observation; she's wondering if she's next.

When I came to write my own memoir, I was telling a small, personal story about being a mom at the turn of the millennium. I wanted to link the story to larger cultural forces I had observed, to what I saw as a kind of generational obsession with perfect parenting. Again I found the model in MacDonald's writing. It was possible to connect the larger story to my own small story, without pretending to be definitive or historical. In fact, the more I focused on the details of my particular experience, the more I could give a feeling of the culture that I swam in.

The message that MacDonald had sent me is one of sufficiency. The homely, she says, is more than enough. There's a clue, of course, right there in the title. It's been telling me since I was a girl, right up through the time I became a writer myself: Anybody can do anything. Even this. Even you.

Claire Dederer is the author of the bestselling memoir "Poser: My Life in Twenty-Three Yoga Poses." She lives with her family on Bainbridge Island. Reprinted with permission from the Columbia Journalism Review.