Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously
by Julie Powell
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Book Summary Information
Author: Julie PowellEdition: Mass Market Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2009-07-01
ISBN: 031604251X
Number of pages: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Book Reviews of Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously
Book Review: Not what you'd expect, but an excellent book despite itself
Summary: 4 Stars
I am giving this book a 4-star review, but I must explain why in detail because I understand some of the vicious reviews others have given it.
First, by now, most of us buying this book will have already seen the movie, and, as others have noted, the real Julie Powell is not at all like Amy Adams. In the movie, Amy is adorable, cute, and attractive, an ideal protaganist to root for. Julie Powell, as she presents herself in this book, is not only a bitch, but a whining, self-pitying, narcississtic bitch--an almost thoroughly unlikable character.
Second, as we all know, editors have gone the way of linotype machines--I guess they started disappearing 20 or 30 years ago, and by now, the folks with that title seem to be little more than project managers whose only focus is managing deadlines and maybe expenses. The prose in the beginning of the book is really hard to take; reading it made me as uncomfortable as watching an untalented child screeching for attention from a stage. It seemed as though half the sentences had an extra third tacked on where Julie was trying to prove she was an 'author' who could really 'write'. An editor working on a college newspaper could have vastly improved the book with a red pencil and some strong guidance.
Third, this is based on a blog. This means there is only one subject: the attention-starved author whose exhibitionism creates a completely unwarranted sense of self-importance in the author's own mind and heart. The book is not about cooking, not about learning, not even about working through Julia Child's classic cookbook, it is about Julie, and nothing but Julie. I can completely understand why Julia might not have liked the blog: what I wanted to see was, 'Here's what I am going to cook next, here are my adventures and misadventures encountered along the way, here is how it tasted, here is what I learned about cooking and about myself.' That is most emphatically not what this book is about. Julie was given the nickname Sarah Bernhardt from a very young age because she has evidently been given to histrionics and tantrums since birth--that's pretty much what the book is about.
Having now confirmed most of the negative appraisals given by those reviewers who only gave this book 1 or 2 stars and probably wished they could have given it zero, how do I get from here to a 4 star review? Let me try to explain.
This is, quite inadvertantly, a very adult book. Granted, the language is that of a foul-mouthed teenager, the attitude that of a petulant child, the insights, well, there really aren't any. I would not recommend this book to any under 25, maybe even under 30. We have all seen unfortunate homeless people, and have wondered for a moment before we turned away how they got that way. Imagine a homeless vet who lost his family, home, and life to the runaway drug addiction that came from trying to self-medicate his unending night terrors. Now, imagine the memoirs of his life he might write once he got off the street, but is still living in an SRO. Imagine how grim that memoir might be. This is what this book is like.
Julie Powell is not a drunk, or a drug addict; she is a reasonably sane, functioning adult, but she is deeply damaged, still trapped in some childhood drama that we, even now, know nothing about because she lacks the insight to see it for herself yet.
But, even though I did have to skip a few pages towards the beginning of the book that were just unbearable, the book became more compelling as I forged ahead for two critical reasons:
1) Julie actually learned to write as she was writing this book. A decent editor would have pointed this out and cleaned up the amateurish, exhibitionist beginning to match the more maturely written last half of the book, but, alas, Julie was ill-served by a project manager. Offhand, I would say the most egregiously bad writing is confined to the first 30-50 pages or so, and seems to disappear almost entirely after page 80.
2) The growth I was hoping to see Julie undergo during the project only really began to happen afterwards, while she was writing this book. But she did grow as she wrote the book, although in ways she is apparently yet unable to see. If you think of this as a memoir of a drug addict after an intervention, you will begin to see the value in it. The book is funny, and episodic, and meant to be a number of things, but it is mostly grim and compelling. It's like watching an addict invent rehab on their own without ever even realizing it. When Julie says she was drowing and Julia saved her, she's telling the truth. She was lost in a crappy life, but the only thing that really made her life crappy was her, not her husband, family, friends, job, apartment, or city. All of the crappiness was entirely inside Julie, entirely of her own making, and it was only through committing herself to this journey that she was able to begin to drag herself out of her narcisstic black hole of misery.
Nora Ephron based her movie on two books that she essentially threw away in order to make up a beautiful dual story of personal growth. I am so glad she invented the character that Amy Adams realized so well. This book, on the other hand, tells the very adult tale of an immature, un-self-aware, miserable narcissist who began to work her way out of this nightmare of her own making by discovering the joy of learning that Julia so fully embodied. When she writes of this at the end of the book, she is still embarrassed to use the word 'joy', and this alone should give you an indication of how deeply damaged she really is. But, as you get further and further into the book, you begin to see the redemptive power of committment to a project outside of one's own neurotic orbit, a redemption that begins to work its magic even though Julie is too miserable and flawed to see anything more than glimpses of it herself.
The movie is cute, and funny, and wonderful, and light. This book is a grim memoir of redemption that is made all the more powerful by the fact that the author is too unperceptive to see what is going on herself. There is a turning point in the book, but it's hard to find because Julie never saw it herself, so she didn't structure the narrative around it. The book is life-affirming and ultimately very positive because it shows that the right mission, diligently followed, can save us despite our attempts to sabotage it.
Even if you decide not to read this book, I would hope that Julie will, so she could see how far she has come and how far she has yet to go.
Summary of Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously
Julie & Julia, the bestselling memoir that's "irresistible....A kind of Bridget Jones meets The French Chef" (Philadelphia Inquirer), is now a major motion picture. Julie Powell, nearing thirty and trapped in a dead-end secretarial job, resolves to reclaim her life by cooking in the span of a single year, every one of the 524 recipes in Julia Child's legendary Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Her unexpected reward: not just a newfound respect for calves' livers and aspic, but a new life-lived with gusto. The film is written and directed by Nora Ephron and stars Amy Adams as Julie and Meryl Streep as Julia.Julie & Julia is the story of Julie Powell's attempt to revitalize her marriage, restore her ambition, and save her soul by cooking all 524 recipes in Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume I, in a period of 365 days. The result is a masterful medley of Bridget Jones' Diary meets Like Water for Chocolate, mixed with a healthy dose of original wit, warmth, and inspiration that sets this memoir apart from most tales of personal redemption.
When we first meet Julie, she's a frustrated temp-to-perm secretary who slaves away at a thankless job, only to return to an equally demoralizing apartment in the outer boroughs of Manhattan each evening. At the urging of Eric, her devoted and slightly geeky husband, she decides to start a blog that will chronicle what she dubs the "Julie/Julia Project." What follows is a year of butter-drenched meals that will both necessitate the wearing of an unbearably uncomfortable girdle on the hottest night of the year, as well as the realization that life is what you make of it and joy is not as impossible a quest as it may seem, even when it's -10 degrees out and your pipes are frozen.
Powell is a natural when it comes to connecting with her readers, which is probably why her blog generated so much buzz, both from readers and media alike. And while her self-deprecating sense of humor can sometimes dissolve into whininess, she never really loses her edge, or her sense of purpose. Even on day 365, she's working her way through Mayonnaise Collee and ending the evening "back exactly where we started--just Eric and me, three cats and Buffy...sitting on a couch in the outer boroughs, eating, with Julia chortling alongside us...."
Inspired and encouraging, Julie and Julia is a unique opportunity to join one woman's attempt to change her life, and have a laugh, or ten, along the way. --Gisele Toueg
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