Anybody Can Do Anything by Betty Macdonald

It’s been a while since I listened to all the Betty Macdonald books on audio, courtesy of review copies from Post-Hypnotic Press, and every now and then I remember to write about them. Anybody Can Do Anything (1950) is the third – after The Egg and I about chicken farming and The Plague and I about life in a TB hospital. This is the most general so far, and also my favourite of the four autobiographical books Macdonald wrote.

It takes place during the Great Depression, where jobs are scarce and Betty is desperate. So desperate, in fact, that she takes the advice of her go-getter sister Mary. Mary insists that anybody can do anything, and specifically that anybody can get any sort of job. Which is how, in the era of very little employment, Macdonald manages to secure (and lose) a vast number of jobs.

As usual with Macdonald, she meanders around the topic for a little too long before getting into it – each of her books would be slightly better with the first chapter lopped off – but once we’re in the sway, it’s hilarious. She works as a photo tinter, she works a stenographer, she works as a typist. She has various office jobs, she gets involved in a pyramid scheme, she organises the offices for a mining company – and gets in trouble for putting all the maps in size order, rather than by place or contract. Often we don’t see quite how she leaves these jobs, but there are dozens of them – each time, Macdonald describes her own ineptitudes extremely amusingly. She has self-deprecating down so well that you’d swear she was British.

This does all eventually lead to her sister forcing her to try writing, so there was definitely a happy ending. But the pinnacle of the book is a lengthy section that is creepy rather than simply an amusing catastrophe. It concerns a woman whose name I can’t remember but was something like Doritos. She turns up a shift of folding papers and putting them in envelopes (if I recall) and talks wildly, roots through Macdonald’s bag, and later starts stalking her. That doesn’t do this section justice – she is built up like something in a suspense novel, and it shows an element to Macdonald’s writing that I hadn’t seen elsewhere. Masterfully done, and leaves us with nervous laughter rather than the empathetic, happy laughter of the rest.

Macdonald’s personal life is curiously absent from the page. Her time in the TB clinic is glossed over in a sentence (understandably, given the amount of time she spends on it in The Plague and I), but she also acquires a husband almost incidentally – and her children are scarcely mentioned at all. Perhaps she didn’t want to dilute what focus the book does has, but it is bizarre to remember that they exist, in the middle of some amusing exploits in an office Macdonald is comically ill-suited to.

As before, Heather Henderson does a brilliant job narrating this – I can’t imagine Betty Macdonald in any other hands now. Heartily recommended.

10 thoughts on “Anybody Can Do Anything by Betty Macdonald

  • July 18, 2018 at 6:20 pm
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    “Onions in the Stew” is one of her books.They sound similar to Monica Dickens so i must seek them out.

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  • July 18, 2018 at 11:18 pm
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    But Simon, Onions in the Stew is her BEST book, and you never mention it! I swear I’m going to stay at the b & b on Vashon Island in what used to be her farmhouse…

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    • July 18, 2018 at 11:19 pm
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      It’s also the fourth and I’m getting there!! I did love it, but preferred this one.

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  • July 19, 2018 at 12:52 am
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    I’ve only read one of her books, but I like the sound of this one. I wonder if my library has it as an audio book…

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  • July 19, 2018 at 1:52 am
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    I read Onions in the Stew a month or so ago and loved it. It made me want to go live on an island. I haven’t read this though. I would say that I need to find a copy and buy it but books are taking over my house. I don’t think that is a problem but the rest of my family might want to be able to walk around without knocking over stacks of books.

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  • July 19, 2018 at 4:10 am
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    This does remind me of One Pair of Hands by Monica Dickens. Would be interested in your comparison of the two.
    You made me laugh with the name something like Doritos. Good way to end the night, with a laugh!

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    • July 19, 2018 at 1:27 pm
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      This is the problem with audio; I never knew how it was written!

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  • July 19, 2018 at 3:28 pm
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    “She has self-deprecating down so well that you’d swear she was British.”

    Ha! Thank goodness my coffee was safely in a mug on the desk, not in my mouth.

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  • July 19, 2018 at 9:56 pm
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    I very much enjoyed this! When my husband and I were poor and young, we used to read MacDonald’s books aloud to each other. The library accused us of not having returned The Plague and I. We swore we had, only to find it under the couch when we moved.

    I’ve never returned to her books–perhaps been afraid to–but I did love them.

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  • July 23, 2018 at 11:47 pm
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    I just read this recently, along with Onions in the Stew, and enjoyed it very much: she is very funny. But the style and structure is strange – I think she was such a bestseller by then that nobody edited her…

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