Julie & Julia

The full title of this book is Julie & Julia: 365 days, 524 recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen: How One Girl Risked Her Marriage, Her Job, and Her Sanity to Master the Art of Living. You might think that a book that needs both a subtitle and a sub-subtitle needs a lot of explanation, but it doesn't, not really. Julie Powell set out to cook all the recipes in Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking within a year. And she blogged about it. And she got a little famous from it and got a book deal. This is the book.

I finished reading this book several days ago and I put off writing about it because I wasn't entirely sure how I felt about it. It wasn't quite what I expected, but I'm not sure I can exactly put my finger on how.

Let's start with the obvious criticism. Before she started her blog, Julie Powell was not a writer. It shows. The writing isn't bad by any means, but it's sometimes hard to follow, and at times I got the sense that she was trying a little too hard to be clever. I was also vaguely put off by all the potshots she takes at Republicans; lord knows I'm a bleeding heart liberal, but I find that sort of thing irritating when it doesn't really have anything to do with the story.

Anyway. Julie started the project as she approached her 30th birthday and found herself living in New York City, being told by doctors that she'd better hurry up and get pregnant if she wanted any shot at having kids, and working temp jobs with no clear direction in her life. She started the Julie/Julia Project on a whim, but it quickly took over her existence. She found herself scouring the city for obscure ingredients, cutting up live lobsters, and dining on brains. The surreality of constantly cooking and eating such foods was compounded when the media started paying attention. She wrote about all of it for her fiercely loyal blog audience. The book recounts the whole thing; the cooking, the blogging, and the rise to (moderate) fame. It really is a fun, quick, and interesting read.

I think the thing that caught me off guard about this book is that Julie is bitter, misanthropic, and neurotic. I expected the story to be more beautiful, not laced with curse words and sexual innuendo. This didn't bother me, of course; I love curse words and sexual innuendo! It just wasn't what I expected. And I felt like the cover was misleading; it seems so gentle! Julie's story is anything but; she is not a happy person, and the recipes in MtAoFC are a source of torment at least as often as they are a pleasurable creative outlet.

Still, crankiness aside, it is impossible not to like Julie in the end. It might be stereotypically Generation X, but I can't say that late-20s ennui is something I haven't experienced. Julie attacks it head-on and in the least likely way. She's dark and funny but in the end, also deeply reverent. "I have no claim over the woman at all," Julie writes upon Julia's death, "unless it’s the claim those who have
nearly drowned have over the person who pulled them out of the ocean." That we get to read about this rescue is a pretty great thing.