The Plague and I

by Betty MacDonald

Overview

“Getting tuberculosis in the middle of your life is like starting downtown to do a lot of urgent errands and being hit by a bus. When you regain consciousness you remember nothing about the urgent errands. You can’t even remember where you were going.”

Thus begins Betty MacDonald’s memoir of her year in a sanatorium just outside Seattle battling the “White Plague.” MacDonald uses her offbeat humor to make the most of her time in the TB sanatorium—making all of us laugh in the process.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780295999784
Publisher:	University of Washington Press
Publication date:	09/01/2016
Edition description:	Reissue
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.70(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Betty MacDonald (1907–1958), the best-selling author of The Egg and I and the classic Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle children’s books, burst onto the literary scene shortly after the end of World War II. The Plague and I takes up Betty’s delightful misadventures where The Egg and I left off. She continued chronicling her life story with memoirs Anybody Can Do Anything and finally Onions in the Stew. She lived on Vashon Island in Washington’s Puget Sound.

Table of Contents

1. “Oh Captain! My Captain!”

2. I Have a Little Shadow—Who Don’t?

3. “Good-bye, Good-bye to Everything!”

4. All New Patients Must First Be Boiled

5. Oh, Salvadora! Don’t Spit on the Floora

6. Anybody Can Have Tuberculosis

7. Heavy, Heavy Hangs on Our Hands

8. I’m Cold and So Is the Attitude of the Staff

9. Kimi

10. A Smile or a Scar

11. Deck the Halls with Old Crepe Paper! Tra, La, La, La, La, Lala, La, La!

12. Occupational Therapy

13. My Operation

14. Ambulant Hospital

15. Eight Hours Up

16. A Toecover and How It Breeds

17. Privileges

18. “Let Me Out! Let Me Out!”

19. “Whom’s with Who?”

Editorial Reviews

"MacDonald writes about her seclusion in a way that is painfully, barkingly funny. . . . Her style is completely her own, the sprawling sentences packed with anecdote, incident, bang-on simile and throwaway wit—it’s like overhearing a conversation between someone who keeps forgetting to breathe and another who keeps asking ‘and what happened next?"

Guardian - Lissa Evans

"An appetizing, well-seasoned feast. MacDonald’s sharp, witty observations as she spends almost a year in The Pines Clinic, outside of Seattle, are perfectly pitched to satisfy readers of memoirs and historical and journalistic fiction, with a huge dollop of idiosyncratic humour. It more than satisfies, in fact, because MacDonald is an impressive and engaging storyteller."

Jules Morgan

"Improbably funny. . . equally remarkable."

Open Letters Monthly - Steve Donoghue

"Can you imagine writing a whole book about being forbidden to do anything other than lie in bed? But Betty does, and she somehow makes it a riveting chronicle."

Emerald City Book Review - Lory Widmer Hess

An appetizing, well-seasoned feast. MacDonald's sharp, witty observations as she spends almost a year in The Pines Clinic, outside of Seattle, are perfectly pitched to satisfy readers of memoirs and historical and journalistic fiction, with a huge dollop of idiosyncratic humour. It more than satisfies, in fact, because MacDonald is an impressive and engaging storyteller.

--Jules Morgan "The Lancet"

Can you imagine writing a whole book about being forbidden to do anything other than lie in bed? But Betty does, and she somehow makes it a riveting chronicle.

--Lory Widmer Hess "Emerald City Book Review"

Improbably funny. . . equally remarkable.

--Steve Donoghue "Open Letters Monthly"

MacDonald writes about her seclusion in a way that is painfully, barkingly funny. . . . Her style is completely her own, the sprawling sentences packed with anecdote, incident, bang-on simile and throwaway wit--it's like overhearing a conversation between someone who keeps forgetting to breathe and another who keeps asking 'and what happened next?

--Lissa Evans "Guardian"

From the Publisher