Anybody Can Do Anything (1950)

Another memoir by Betty MacDonald, who having recently left the chicken farm she wrote about in The Egg and I, comes home to Seattle. It's the Depression Era, and jobs are very hard to come by. She feels herself woefully inadequate and lacking in office skills but her older sister Mary has connections everywhere and is indomitably optimistic; she pushes Betty into one job after another. Most of them don't last long. Everything from being a secretary (dictation, shorthand, mimeograph machines) to selling advertising, working the sales floor, tinting photographs by hand, and organizing Christmas parties for large corporations. Eventually she gets steady work in the offices of the National Recovery Administration, and from goes on to find her feet as a writer.

In the meantime, most of Anybody Can Do Anything is full of awkward interviews, scrambling to acquire or prove non-existent job skills, fending off jealous co-workers and sidestepping desperate people on the sidewalk where "every day found a better class of people selling apples on street corners." At home she and her sisters pinch pennies, make do and find various sources of free entertainment (like attending music students' recitals to laugh at the awkward performances!). While the gloom of the Depression is always present- desperation for jobs, hearing of people committing suicide, constantly dodging debt collectors- the ability of Betty and her family to keep their heads up and find amusement in everyday circumstances makes this little memoir glow.

from the Dogear Diary ( )