Julie PowellMichael Falco
In 2002, before personal food blogs became ubiquitous (disclosure: I write one), 29-year-old Julie Powell, frustrated with her secretarial job and lack of prospects, came up with a great, career-making idea: Over a year, she would cook every recipe in Julia Child's classic Mastering the Art of French Cooking and blog about it.
The blog, called the Julie/Julia Project, gained a huge following online, which led to a book contract. The 2005 book, a memoir titled Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen, retooled the blog posts into an inspiring self-actualization narrative, became a bestseller, was made into a major motion picture starring Meryl Streep as Julia Child and Amy Adams as Powell, and transformed Powell from a Queens, New York, nobody into a well-paid, published, famous writer.
Powell seemed to have won the life lottery, but as she relates in the prologue of her ambitious and rambling follow-up memoir, Cleaving , in the midst of her success she still felt the restlessness and discontent that had propelled her to embark on the Julie/Julia project to begin with.
So, despite being married to the saintly, beautiful, loving, sweet, loyal, gentle Eric (all adjectives Powell's), a man whose life and soul had been "irrevocably" linked to hers since they met at the age of 18, she started having sex with the less attractive but more sexually compelling man she calls D. And two years after the affair began, while she was still living with Eric, who was by then having a retaliatory affair of his own, she took up butchery.
Part I of Cleaving follows Powell for six months as she obsesses about herself, the affair and her marriage, and cuts her way through a butcher apprenticeship program at an upstate New York shop owned by friendly "meat hippies." In Part II, she travels to Argentina, Ukraine and Tanzania - not, I can only hope, because she didn't have enough material for the book, and/or because exotic locales would give it a flavour of that other mega-hit foodie memoir Eat Pray Love, but so that she could learn about international meat practices and do carnivore-affirming things such as drink blood from a freshly killed African goat. She also needed more time away from Eric and D in order to examine and re-examine her feelings about them.
The butchering section makes up about two-thirds of the book, and the many paragraphs devoted to butchering techniques, including eight pages that detail the process by which a chuck shoulder is broken down, are convincing and vividly detailed, though they will be best appreciated by readers who actually care where cuts of meat come from.
For the rest of us, it is difficult not to see the butchery as a device, an activity engaged in to provide a framework for Round Two of Powell's personal-development story. It doesn't help that Powell lays on the meat-related metaphors at every opportunity: a cup and ball of bone Powell is cutting are "as tightly knotted together with white bands of sinew as a devoted husband and wife." A breakup is compared to the process of cleaning a skirt steak: "I pick and I pick and I pick at these connecting shreds that cling to me." A spell of sausage-making reminds Powell of D's penis, and on and on.
Powell's original blog became popular not least because of her distinctive voice, which is conversational, profane, irreverent and brimming with attitude. A more sombre but still feisty version of that first-person voice drives this book and shows Powell to be a good stylist who excels at descriptive passages, captures the cadence of her generation in her word choices and pop-culture allusions, and can compose clever, interesting sentences.
What's harder to like is the Julie Powell character/narrator as presented by Powell the writer. In keeping with the current confessional age, when attention-seeking memoirists expose their base urges, wrongdoings and vanity for the entertainment of a voyeuristic public, Powell lustfully recounts how she enjoyed sexual submission and rough sex with D, laughs off her habitual heavy drinking/alcoholism, and too often forgoes self-deprecation in favour of self-praise, as in this passage about her love of texting: "Why stammer into a headset when I can carefully compose a witty, thoughtful missive? With written words I can persuade, tease, seduce. My words are what make me desirable."
More disturbing is her decision to include in the story so many mentions of the different ways - some related with mischievous delight - that she and D betrayed, deceived and sneaked around on Eric.
After revealing more than many readers will want to know, Powell ends the book on an uncharacteristically cryptic note, back at the butcher shop. She cuts, flirts and banters with her butcher friends, seems happier, and suggests that her marriage to Eric continues. Like her, it's apparently a work in progress that, though cleft, has not yet broken.
Kim Moritsugu's most recent novel is The Restoration of Emily. She blogs about food as The Hungry Novelist.