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Originally Posted by lene1949
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I'm wondering if I have missed something about Betty's relationship with her baby daughter?
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I got the feeling that this book was written as a way for the author to come (humorly) to terms with a dark part of her life. She did not like the experience, and she has come to resent most of what is associated with it. Her daughter, on the other hand, she still loved when she wrote the book, and I see the absence of her baby in the text as a way to preserve the child's privacy, and to keep her away from all the negative connotations in the book.
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Originally Posted by Zipr
Looking at the the Wikipedia page for Betty McDonald adds some new perspective.
- The daughters, Anne and Joan, were real; not fiction
- She wrote about her life with Bob while she was married to her second husband
- Her divorce from Bob must not have been to amicable as there was no contact between them afterward
- She was sued by the real family portrayed as the Kettles
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The portrayal of Bob in the book is so negative all the time that I am not really surprised to learn it ended badly! In the last chapter there is a sentence she says that sums up for me their relationship:
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“Husband and wife teamwork is just fine except when it reaches a point where the husband is more conscious of the weight his wife’s shoulder carries than of the shoulder itself.”
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I rather enjoyed the book, it was a light, easy read, and it gave me a couple giggles. I read this thread before the book, and I expected some much darker events, but I found it ok. One of the only thing that really bothered me was the Indian bashing - cultural phenomenon or not, it made me cringe.
The other thing that really annoyed me was the structure - or lack thereof - of the book. I'm all for unchronological narration, but the theme and sub-theme classification was so disorganized! I got the impression that Mrs MacDonald wrote a lot of individual events and stories on specific themes, then shuffled them to make them fit with the season theme.
(that was my first participation in the Book Club, ladies and gentlemen!)