Her family moved to the north slope of Seattle's Capitol Hill neighborhood in 1918, moving to the Laurelhurst neighborhood a year later and finally settling in the Roosevelt neighborhood in 1922, where she graduated from Roosevelt High School in 1924. Her official birth date is given as March 26, 1908, although federal census returns seem to indicate 1907. MacDonald was born Anne Elizabeth Campbell Bard in Boulder, Colorado. In Onions in the Stew, MacDonald is in unbuttonedly frolicsome form as she describes how, with husband and daughters, she set to work making a life on a rough-and-tumble island in Puget Sound, a ferry-ride from Seattle. Anybody Can Do Anything is a high-spirited, hilarious celebration of how “the warmth and loyalty and laughter of a big family” brightened their weathering of The Great Depression. The White Plague was no laughing matter, but MacDonald nonetheless makes a sprightly tale of her brush with something deadly. The Plague and I recounts MacDonald’s experiences in a Seattle sanitarium, where the author spent almost a year (1938-39) battling tuberculosis.
Although MacDonald’s Þrst and most popular book, The Egg and I, has remained in print since its original publication, her three other volumes have been unavailable for decades.
Well, that’s what discovering Betty MacDonald was like for I happened to read a couple of pages of one of her books and - click - knew right away that here was a vivacious writer whose friendly, funny, and Þery company I was really going to enjoy. You know how sometimes friendship blossoms in the Þrst few moments of meeting? “Something clicked,” we say.
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