DATE March 2010 selection

The dream for most writers, fiction or nonfiction, is for their labor of love--their work--to get published in whatever format--print, online, e-book, etc. If somehow that work also gets turned into a movie, whoopie!

Imagine being a writer having both things happen on your first attempt. That’s the fairytale scenario that produced Julie Powell’s book Julie & Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen (also titled Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously). It began as a blog, The Julie/Julia Project, which still exists online hosted by Salon.

Powell prefaced that blog with the following:

"The Book:

"Mastering the Art of French Cooking". First edition, 1961. Louisette Berthole. Simone Beck. And, of course, Julia Child.  The book that launched a thousand celebrity chefs. Julia Child taught America to cook, and to eat. It’s forty years later. Today we think we live in the world Alice Waters made, but beneath it all is Julia, 90 if she's a day, and no one can touch her.

The Contender:

Government drone by day, renegade foodie by night. Too old for theatre, too young for children, and too bitter for anything else, Julie Powell was looking for a challenge. And in the Julie/Julia project she found it. Risking her marriage, her job, and her cats’ well-being, she has signed on for a deranged assignment.

365 days. 536 recipes. One girl and a crappy outer borough kitchen.

How far will it go? We can only wait. And wait. And wait…..

The Julie/Julia Project. Coming soon to a computer terminal near you."

The blog quite understandably revolves around Julie and her life. She presents a glimpse into her somewhat neurotic inner life and her quest to conquer Mastering the Art of French Cooking--and by extension her own self.

The focus of the book Julie and Julia is expanded to include Paul Child’s letters as chapter openers, which is where the book shines.  The love story of Paul and Julia Child may send you to another couple of books, Appetite for Life by Noel Riley Fitch and My life in France by Julia Child with Alex Prud'homme, for more.

Julie and Julia—the movie version—opens the reader/viewer even more to Julia Child’s life with its struggles and triumphs. Readers and viewers get to know Julia Child before she becomes her iconic self, before Mastering the Art of French Cooking. We briefly meet Child’s co-writers, Louisette Bertholle and Simone Beck. Even Irma S. Rombauer of Joy of Cooking fame makes an appearance.

Julie Powell's current blog, What Could Happen?: Musings from a "soiled and narcissistic whore."  Her new book, Cleaving, explores yet another food related venture, butchering—and more on her life and marriage. She is also working on an unnamed novel.

Discussion questions for Julie and Julia can be found here.