Appetizer
She walks into a Brooklyn restaurant in a flurry, a tall woman wearing a dark coat with feathery cuffs and neckline, her brown hair in messy pigtails.
With her shocking new memoir, Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat, and Obsession , Julie Powell is awakening appetites for who she really is. And now, she offers herself up for consumption. She laughs, apologizes for her lateness and plunks herself down like a sack of potatoes.
If she was sweet in her first memoir, Julie & Julia , about her effort to change her secretarial life and deal with turning the big 3-0 by cooking her way through Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking – a tale that became the popular Nora Ephron movie of the same name – she is now asking her audience to digest a different helping of her personality.
She looks up meekly as a waiter lists the food choices, then narrows her eyes as if in concentration, nodding approvingly at each description. At her neck, she wears a pendant of a tiny bear trap. “Eric gave it to me,” she explains, pushing at the gift from her husband with a fingertip. And on her wedding finger, flashing in the low light of the restaurant, there's her wedding ring.
They're still together?
At the end of Cleaving , in which she documents her extramarital affair with a former flame named D while learning about butchery (yes, the metaphoric perfection seems a bit engineered), the outcome of her 11-year marriage is unclear. And one wonders if her husband, whom she's known since they were both 18, would want reconciliation after revelations of her predilection for rough sex (D is better at tying her up than hubby is, apparently) and of anonymous sex she had with men contacted online.
“Oh, yes, yes,” she replies girlishly, shaking her pigtails.
She orders the ravioli with roasted chestnuts. Not much of an appetite tonight, she reports. At lunch, she ate blood sausage.
Julie Powell’s racier memoir may cause ‘psychic whiplash,’ she says.
Main course
“There's something about telling everyone my experience, and how I feel, and sort of seeking their judgment,” she explains, well into the meal of her dark and sinewy psyche. “It's not healthy.” She shrugs and offers a raucous laugh.
Her problem was success. “It doesn't feel deserved when it's dropped in your lap,” the 36-year-old says. “I was feeling this queer sense of dissatisfaction. I was sitting there and looking at my life and saying, ‘Look, I wrote a book and there's a movie deal. I should be really fucking proud of myself.' And yet I didn't feel it.”
Her success also tested her marriage. “I had grown so entwined with Eric over the years, and I didn't see this dependency of me on him and him on me as problematic, and one of the things that happened when I found success was that my life changed. I didn't have to go to the office any more. I had a lot of time on my hands. I had money. … I do think Eric was threatened.”
Her solution was to cut up animal carcasses as an apprentice butcher, to separate from her husband, travel on her own to foreign countries and have sex with other men.
“I was frantic about finding someone who would give me a sense of self-worth,” she says in the measured, confident voice of someone who self-palpates with a therapist.
“I loved cybersex because I was so much better at it than anyone else. I knew what these guys wanted, and I was very articulate. I made them think that they knew what I wanted and they were going to give it to me. In the midst of it, I felt very powerful.
“But when I walked away, I felt so empty. I felt nothing but contempt for them because they were so easy to control, and I realized they were completely unworthy of me.”
