My Life in France
by Alex Prud'Homme, Julia Child
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Book Reviews of My Life in France
Book Review: Julia Child in Love
Summary: 4 Stars
"MY LIFE IN FRANCE"
by Julia Child with Alex Prud'homme
The idea for this book was born in 1969 when Julia and her husband Paul in sifting through letters and photographs of their time in France (1948-54) realized that those formative and joyous years contained the elements for a book. It took thirty-six years but with the help of her grandnephew Alex, "the French book," as she called it is a delightful reality.
The cackling laugh and self-effacing humor so familiar to those millions for whom Julia demystified French cooking jumped off the page as I devoured this book with the same enthusiasm as a civet de sanglier on a cold Parisian day.
Who could have predicted that the daughter of a staunchly Republican, Pasadena WASP businessman and a social mom who rarely ventured into kitchen would become one of the world's foremost authorities on The Art of French Cooking?
She did it by absorbing the culture-listening, watching and questioning as in this visit to her local crémerie:
" Madame was a whiz at judging the ripeness of cheese. If you asked for a camembert, she would cock an eyebrow and ask at what time you wished to serve it; would you be eating it for lunch today, or at dinner tonight, or would you be enjoying it a few days hence? Once you had answered, she'd open several boxes, press each cheese intently with her thumbs, take a big sniff, and-voilá-she'd hand you just the right one. I marveled at her ability to calibrate a cheese's readiness down to the hour, and would even order cheese when I didn't need it just to watch her in action. I never knew her to be wrong."
MY LIFE IN FRANCE chronicles Julia's education as a chef in Paris, her collaboration with Simone (Simca) Beck and Louisette Bertholle on the seminal MASTERING THE ART OF FRENCH COOKING and the creation of THE FRENCH CHEF cooking show that established her as a media star.
But it is also a love story as Paul's tender observation of quotidian culinary activity so poignantly reveals: "She's becoming an expert plucker, skinner and boner. It's a wonderful sight to see her pulling all the guts out of a chicken through a tiny hole in it's neck and then, from the same little orifice, loosening the skin from the flesh in order to put in an array of leopard-spots made of truffles. Or to watch her remove all the bones from a goose without tearing the skin. And you ought to see {her} skin a wild hare-you'd swear she'd just been "Comin Round the Mountain with Her Bowie Knife in Hand."
My Life in France feels like a home-cooked meal with Julia in her kitchen.
Book Review: As Satisfying as a Hand Made Bowl of Julia's Potage Veloute au Champignons
Summary: 5 Stars
It all began with a new bride wanting to learn to cook and progressed to owning a share in a cooking school, writing classic cookbooks that will be in print for many years, and becoming a television celebrity.
During her last years, Julia Child and her husband's grandnephew, Alex Prud'homme, met frequently to record her memories. The heart of the narrative is her first years in France, where she arrived in 1948 as a newly wed whose cooking repertoire was comprised of a bad job of boiling water. The serious home cook, who has dabbled in a variety of cuisines (and most certainly French), may reap the most enjoyment, yet her story is intensely interesting, on a personal and public level, and very well written. There were moments when I wished I had a French dictionary at my side, but those moments weren't frequent enough to spoil a good read.
Considering her age at the time of the writing, Prud'homme most certainly would have been responsible for the organization and undoubtedly did the bulk of the writing. But his contribution and his great aunt's voice are seamlessly interwoven. As I read, I could hear her warbling, high-pitched voice and was reminded of her wit from her television cooking shows.
I read the last page with a smile, shut the book, and felt as satisfied as if I had just finished making her recipe for Cream of Mushroom Soup and found it to be perfect in every respect. I get the feeling that Julia looked back on her life with that same sense of satisfaction. She doesn't apologize for her privileged background, and she doesn't complain about being a somewhat homely, well-educated, quite bright, six-foot-two-inch woman who didn't marry until she was well into her thirties and never had the children she and her husband wished for. She mentions her sadness at not being able to share a close relationship, or even a viewpoint, with her father, but she doesn't wallow in it. She incorporates names, but never drops them. She is unpretentious, natural, and disarmingly honest.
So many people look back with harrowing tales of disappointment and unhappiness; Julia gave us her joys and successes to share. I liked her before I knew anything about her life; now I like her a lot more.
Book Review: Not quite what I expected
Summary: 3 Stars
Let me say that I have trouble giving mre than three stars to a book that has no real ending. This book started out as very interesting and then kind of trailed off into nothing for the last few chapters. I agree with the other reviewers who say that you can get a pretty good picture of post war Europe as seen through the eyes of an American woman who was not unintelligent. However I also agree with the reviews that say you will probably like Julia Child less after you read this book. She comes across as a somewhat bright person (but far from brilliant) who was probably suffering from a mild case of obsessive compulsive disorder. She focused on two things that were important to her; French cultural immersion and cooking. If those were your areas of interest you would have been able to carry on a nice conversation with her. If they weren't, you would have had nothing to say to each other. Her cooking comes across as mechanical and somewhat less inspired than some of her contemporaries that she talks about in the book. She portrays herself as more of an engineer than a chef.
One thing in the book that irked was the constant use of un-translated French. This seemed to be hit or miss. A comment made by someone that seemed important to the story would be translated for us, the next would not. One of the things about the book that was interesting and annoying at the same time was Julia's description of the McCarthy witch hunt in the 1950's and the impact it had on her husband's foreign Service career. This was something that was obviously of great personal concern to them at the time but I came away with a feeling of "I think she doth protest too much" especially about the issue of her husband's sexuality. This was a can of worms that she probably did not want to open in the reader's mind(s) and she made me wonder about the nature of their relationship. Her husband forfeited a great deal of money by his departure before retirement from the Foreign Service. This adds to the reader's perception that you might have been more interested in being a fly on the wall while some of these things were taking place than simply hearing Julia's version of events.
Book Review: An Enthralling Read
Summary: 5 Stars
Alex Prud'homme joined his great-aunt Julia Child to create this perfect memoir, based largely on family correspondence and Prud'homme's interviews with Child in the last year of her life. My Life in France works on a remarkable number of levels to create a complex, satisfying and enthralling read. Among other things, My Life in France is:
--A vividly-rendered travelogue that will transport you to the streets of Paris, the Marseille waterfront and the hills of Provence.
--A tour de force on the cuisine bourgeoise that Julia Child loved and popularized in the United States.
--The love story of Paul and Julia Child or, as they frequently referred to themselves, "PJ" or "Pulia".
--A publishing saga of the herculean efforts associated with the writing and publishing of Mastering the Art of French Cooking, a process that took approximately a decade for volume one and eight years for volume two.
--An autobiography of Julia Child, revealed here as ebullient, dedicated, and almost ruthlessly single-minded in her mission to bring authentic French cookery to the American masses.
Any one of these subjects would be worthy of a memoir. To find them all explored cogently and completely in a single, comparatively slender, beautifully written volume is a marvel. Congratulations to Mr. Prud'homme for shepherding this book to completion, and a hearty 'Bon Appetit' to the memory of Julia Child, a woman who lived life well.
Book Review: Love Julia, hated the book
Summary: 2 Stars
It is hard to reconcile the delightful and generous Julia Child who codified and introduced French cuisine to American audiences on TV and in books with the boorish, petty and whining character found on these pages.
Her reminiscences of long gone establishments, great meals and day to day adventures makes for enjoyable reading. It is her constant carping and complaining that gets tiresome.
She has haughty disregard for her coauthors of MAFC. She complains about the British people. She complains about the German people ("Land of Monsters"). Italian food is "tasteless." She complains about Americans. She loathes her father's conservative middle class status (but her ethics still allow her to take his money and lavish trips). She complains about G.I.s living in Paris. She complains about having to have her picture taken for the cover of a magazine... her TV production schedule... her career bureaucrat husband's superiors... her publishers... it goes on and on and on.
I am going to choose to believe this was not the real Julia Child. Rather the result of an elderly and infirmed woman's musings edited posthumously by her grandson, who writing career consists largely of writing a bio on Rosie O'Donnell.
For now, I am going to put in a DVD of the Julia Child and Jacques Pepin home cooking series and clear my palette from the bad taste this book left in my mouth.