Which writers remind you of Beth?

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Since our fair hostess has seen fit to take a brief [one hopes] hiatus from updates, I was wondering if anyone had any Beth-esque literature to recommend to fill the gap in my day. I recently finished The Egg and I by Betty MacDonald and I think that if Beth had come of age in during WWII, then married a man who suddenly dropped everything to become a rural chicken farmer on then-desolate Vashon Island, dragging his overeducated wife along, this would be the book she would have written. I've stuck in a couple of passages below to illustrate the similarities and to entertain Beth's minions in her absence. (I hope she hasn't succumbed to a kava kava-related illness. It's never wise to poison a lawyer.)

To understand the first passage, a little background on farming life: reading, in this community, was regarded as a sign of laziness. When women found themselves with a spare moment they were expected to devote it to embroidery or some other decorative pursuit, not something selfish and useless such as reading.

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Mrs. Hicks kindly bestowed on me all of her old magazines. She brought them up to me well-wrapped in her contempt for the printed word. Her excuse for having the nasty things in the house at all was a desire for "receipts and pattrons," and she nearly always managed to not include the end of a serial. In those women's magazines I read thousands of stories about girls named Ricky, Nicky or Sticky and boys named Brent, Kent and Trent. They all earned enormous salaries in advertising agencies, and the girls, as totally unjustifed rewards for being both dull and usually disagreeable, had great big apartments full of heat, light and conveniences. The only thing that kept me going, as I read these stories day after day, was the thought that Ricky, Nicky and Sticky would probably get their just desserts whether the authors knew it or not, becaue Brent, Kent and Trent, in spite of their prodigious business acumen and witty repartee, were American men and average (the author implied) and therefore they would either bore Ricky, Nicky and Sticky to death talking about a little chicken ranch or they would cash in on some of those hundred thousand dollar accounts and buy a little chicken ranch. "Then let's see how gay, how smooth, how burnished-headed you are, girls." I would sneer as I ripped the magazine in two and then carefully put it back together again with transparent tape, so I could read some more stories and get mad the next night.

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. . .I realized why it is so much easier for a man to adjust himself to new surroundings and people than for a woman. Men are so much less demanding in friendship. A woman wants her friends to be perfect. She sets a pattern, usually a reasonable facsimile of herself, lays a friend out on this pattern and worries and prods at any little qualities which do not coincide with her own image. She simply won't be bothered with anything less than ninety per cent congruity, and will accept the ninety per cent only if the other ten per cent is shaping up nicely and promises accurate conformity within a short time. Friends with glaring lumps or unsmoothable rough places are cast off like ill-fitting garments, and even if this means that the woman has no friends at all, she seems happier than with some imperfect being for whom she would have to make allowances.

A man has a friend, period. He acquires this particular friend because they both like to hunt ducks. The fact that the friend discourses entirely in four-letter words, very seldom washes, chews tobacco and spits and random, is drunk a good deal of the time and hates women, in no way affects the friendship. If the man notices these flaws in the perfection of his friend, he notices them casually as he does his friend's height, the color of his eyes, the width of his shoulders; and the friendship contines at an even temperature for years and years and years.

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-- Anonymous, January 30, 2000

Answers

Actually, Beth reminds me a lot of Disgruntled Housewife (www.disgruntledhousewife.com). And I just finished "Traveling Mercies" by Anne Lamott which sort of had a Beth feel now and then (I don't know if that would be true of Lamott's novels, though, as I haven't read them).

-- Anonymous, February 01, 2000

Yeah, now that you mention it, Beth does remind me of Betty MacDonald, who's one of my favorite writers. Try to find her book "The Plague And I" about time she spent in a hospital with tuberculosis. Sounds like I'm joking, but it's for real, and it's hilarious.

I love that kind of over the top complaining...

-- Anonymous, February 01, 2000


Hey, Lizzie, thanks for giving me an opening (however narrow) for bragging about my literary connections. I'm familiar with all of Betty MacDonald's work because she and her two sisters (nee Bard) were very close to my grandmother. Betty's sister Mary (who published under her maiden name) wrote a novel titled The Doctor Wears Three Faces in which one of the main characters, Maggie Robbins, is based entirely on my grandmother, Marty Rollins. The Doctor... is out of print, but (in my obviously EXCEEDINGLY BIASED opinion) well worth seeking out; Mary is Betty's equal as a writer, and was very popular in her day.

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-- Anonymous, February 01, 2000


Thanks for the tip!

-- Anonymous, February 02, 2000

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