My Own Two Feet by Beverly Cleary

★★★★

This book literally picks up where A Girl from Yamhill leaves off, with the author on a bus heading for junior college in California.

I enjoyed this book and found it more personal than A Girl from Yamhill, which I thought was written rather matter-of-factly.

We follow the author as she attends college, goes to librarian school, and finds employment, all the while making friends, meeting men, and learning and striving to stand "on her own two feet". Her naivete, and her retrospective self-awareness of it, is amusing.

I think this book would make a good read for a teenage girl who was a fan of Beverly Cleary's books as a child. Even if many of the references are old-fashioned, the author makes for a good role model. She shows integrity, perseverance, and diligence while also making time for an active social life.

Much of what I found interesting in this book was the author's first-hand account of life during the Depression and World War II. Her experiences as a librarian during a time in which reference questions could not be easily and conveniently Googled and carefully maintained card catalogs were the backbone of libraries was fascinating. Perhaps I am showing my ignorance or my age, but I will mention that the author used the acronyms NYA and WPA without explaining them; one quick Google search told me that NYA = National Youth Administration and WPA = Works Progress Administration.

While A Girl from Yamhill offered sporadic connections to Beverly Cleary's books in the early chapters, it is only in the very last part of the final chapter of My Own Two Feet that we are given a satisfying glimpse into the author's writing of her first book, Henry Huggins.

As a fan of Beverly Cleary's works, I wish the book had provided even more background on her life as an author, like where she found her inspiration for other characters besides Henry Huggins, and what anecdotes in her books came from incidents in real life. By the time she wrote this memoir, she had already won awards (she makes a very brief mention of one in particular), and I would have loved to read about how she felt when she received her first award, and what it was like for her to meet and/or receive letters from fans. Her strained relationship with her mother was a theme in both her autobiographies, and I found myself wondering how that relationship might have affected the way she mothered her own children. This book, however, only briefly mentions that she had twins later in life, and the narrative stops right after Henry Huggins was published, before she becomes a mother. As a mother myself, I further wondered how being a mother might have affected her writing, or how her experience as a children's librarian and author might have affected her parenting.