Julie, Julia, and Amy's Opinions

I don't give up very easily. Whether it's a product of stubbornness, parking my pride in two spots so as not to get dinged, or just another quirk in my personality, I don't like putting something down or walking away from something I start. I may throw things, I may whine and complain endlessly, but odds are I stick it out until it's over.

I went to the Brookline Public Library last week to pick up The Red Tent. As always, I checked out the "Speed Read" section, which has new books that you can borrow only for a week so they rotate through faster and more people can read them. Usually these books are mysteries or chick lit, but one caught my eye. Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 recipes, One Tiny Apartment Kitchen. Sounds great, right? The story of a young woman sorting herself out by cooking the traditional recipes that a woman of her mother's generation made accessible to housewives in America. I wish I'd thought of it.

Well, frankly, I'm glad I didn't write it, because it has next to nothing to do with Julia Child, cooking, or learning anything. I'm about one hundred pages into the book and I hate it with a white hot passion. I feel like Simon Cowell, but I really, really hate it. Julie Powell's writing is disorganized and lacks originality. She uses clichés, and often inappropriately without comic effect (one example, "I love my husband like a pig loves shit. Maybe more."). I see what she's trying to do, but I can't stand it. Playing with cliché can be a fun literary exercise, but this just takes away from the point she's trying to make– that she loves her husband. Instead, my first reaction as a reader is to say, "Ugh. Lucky guy. ::eye roll::"

I also wish she'd stuck to the point more. In a chapter about finding a cow bone to get the marrow out of, Powell introduces a friend who offers to help her find the elusive bone. Instead of using neat tricks like dialogue to show us how she feels about her friend, or giving us her friend's backstory through dialogue with somebody, anybody, she goes on and on and on about how Powell feels about her. Which is fine in limited doses, but it takes the reader out of the immediate action of finding the bone and getting the hell on with the recipe, and I just want to flip the three pages (yes, three) ahead and find out what happens.

Many books use cooking to advance the plot and hold the story together effectively. The excellent book Like Water for Chocolate does this nicely. Not all of the action happens in the kitchen, but most of the action relates to some activity that main character, Tita, needs to do to complete a recipe. But what happens defines the characters, advances the plot, and keeps the reader interested. Powell just made me mad because she lends credencence to the argument that bloggers don't make good writers, which I desperately, desperately hope is not the case. I'm sure she doesn't care what I think since she's using her advance to fix up her apartment, but I had such high hopes from the concept that the author didn't deliver.

I kind of hope someone publishes a collection of Julia Child's letters or something, because I can't get enough of reading about her life. Any Amazonian-built woman from Wyoming who pulls a Felicity and goes to Paris to learn to cook and impress her man, but ultimately ends up with her own career is a story I want to know more about. The poorly written story of a frustrated actress in New York transforming her life through Julia Child's cookbooks is, apparently, not one I am interested in.