This compelling talk is about the author of The Egg and I, which reportedly sold one copy every 22 seconds in the 1940s. Although she wrote autobiographically, Betty’s relationship with truth was slippery. Her biographer, Paula Becker, ponders how Betty’s kind of nonfiction relates to the popular genre of memoir today. What – then and now – does “truth” in memoir mean?
Paula Becker is the award-winning author of Looking for Betty MacDonald: The Egg, The Plague, Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle and I, and co-author of The Future Remembered: the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair and Its Legacy and Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition: Washington’s First World’s Fair.
She is an expert on the history of the world fairs, and she narrated Structural Engineers on the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair. She is featured in the documentary films When Seattle Invented the Future: The 1962 World’s Fair, which aired on PBS stations nationwide; and Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition: Washington’s First World’s Fair, which aired on Seattle’s KCTS-9. Becker has written for HistoryLink.org since 2011, and is a staff historian. Her 300+ HistoryLink essays document all aspects of Washington state history.
Parking and admission are free.