Julie Powell, "Julie and Julia"

Overall I would have to say that I enjoyed Julie and Julia, based on my typical metric which is "If I could go back in time, would I read it again?"  The book is both annoying and entertaining, sometimes in equal measure, but it is also unique and unexpected.

As I'm sure you are aware by now, in 2002 Julie Powell began a blog and a challenge: she would make every recipe in Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking over the next year.  Her blog became a success, and she wrote a book which also became a success, and now it's a movie which is also a success.  This stratospheric rise to fame from mere mortal blogger to "source material for a Nora Ephron movie starring Meryl Streep" is just as bizarre and fascinating as the source material itself.

A lot of people have taken pot shots at Julie Powell for being "famous for fame's sake."  What these critics overlook is that Julie Powell truly does have a gift for the written word, and a flamboyantly "I'm a loser and I don't care who knows it" way of discussing her life.  

Her willingness to paint herself as the bad guy, the person who was in the wrong, also helps to defuse a lot of the bitching she does about marriage.  I'm not sure why a book about her year long Julia Child cooking project had so much talk about marriage in it, frankly.  

When Powell isn't discussing her own marriage (which seems just fine, thus making her dissatisfaction somewhat puzzling to the reader), she is detailing the infidelities and peccadilloes of her various friends.  Why?  Do we care?  I don't think we care.  I kept resisting the urge to check the back of the book, to make sure I hadn't bought some weird "Julie and Julia, A Very Special Edition About Marriage" version.

(Another wrong note that kept clanging its way into the narrative was her husband's migraines.  Which neither of them seems to understand are migraines.  Powell refers to them as his "Blanche headaches," and her husband just tries to endure the puzzle as best he can.  I wanted to send her a link to an article explaining what a migraine is, and that it's a real thing.)

I would have liked more talk of the food, what it was like (beyond "that was tasty!") and how it was prepared.  Sometimes it seemed like all the other stuff took center stage, but perhaps that's because the book was meant to serve as a companion piece to her blog.  

I'm left with an impression of French food as being mushy and kind of bland, but not necessarily difficult to make (with a few notable exceptions).  I would never in a million years make an aspic, but I expected to finish the book wanting to try a few of the recipes that she made.  None of them connected with me in the way that a lot of other food writing has.  

Nevertheless, I was genuinely moved when Powell learns that Julia Child disapproves of her project, her blog, and by association Powell herself.  I didn't get what I expected to from Julie and Julia, but it connected with me anyway, and I definitely look forward to Powell's next book.