Julie Powell is Back….with Knives!
Julie Powell got a lot of heat from people who thought she was the less charming half of Julie and Julia, last year’s movie that combined two books - her memoir of cooking her way through Mastering the Art of French Cooking and My Life in France, which focused on Julia Child’s experience developing and writing that cookbook in the 1960s.
Some thought Powell’s character (played by Amy Adams) was too whiny. Too unlikeable. I defended her. Her book is better, I said. Things got lost in the translation from book to film.
Now that I’m done with her second memoir, though, I’m more unsure. It’s not I think Julie Powell is whiny. I do wonder if she doesn’t lean hard toward self-destructive.
This time, Powell combines the unravaling of her marriage with her increasing interest in learning the craft of butchery. You might get a clue from the title that Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat and Obsession is going to be rawer than Julie and Julia. Oh, and a wee bit angrier. And people who want to make the whiny case…hmm, you may have more ammunition here.
Golden chances seem to fall into Powell’s lap. Her best-selling book did sweep her old life as a cubicle drone away, but even Powell had to hustle to find a butcher shop willing to let her apprentince with them. But when she did, did she land one of the best: Fleicher’s, a small butcher in upstate New York dedicated to grass-fed, heirloom meat. Their meat is fantastic - we bought our Christmas roast from there in 2008 when my husband and I were in charge of cooking Chirstmas Eve dinner at my mother-in-law’s house (it crossed my mind that Powell might have prepped it).
Back to the book. It’s not the nitty-gritty descriptions of breaking down steer sides that bothered me. It’s that all the while, Powell seems hell bent on wrecking her marriage - sneaking back to her lover, obsessing about him when he cuts things off, and having sex with a stranger. This is not a syrupy, oh-no-the-beef-bourguignon burned kind of story. It’s pretty fierce, and kind of unpleasant. Yet I couldn’t put it down, and to this day, I’m not sure how I feel about the book. Or Powell. But as long as she keeps writing, I’ll keep reading.
