I am giving this book a 4-star review, but I must explain why in detail because I understand some of the vicious reviews others have given it.
First, by now, most of us buying this book will have already seen the movie, and, as others have noted, the real Julie Powell is not at all like Amy Adams. In the movie, Amy is adorable, cute, and attractive, an ideal protaganist to root for. Julie Powell, as she presents herself in this book, is not only a bitch, but a whining, self-pitying, narcississtic bitch--an almost thoroughly unlikable character.
Second, as we all know, editors have gone the way of linotype machines--I guess they started disappearing 20 or 30 years ago, and by now, the folks with that title seem to be little more than project managers whose only focus is managing deadlines and maybe expenses. The prose in the beginning of the book is really hard to take; reading it made me as uncomfortable as watching an untalented child screeching for attention from a stage. It seemed as though half the sentences had an extra third tacked on where Julie was trying to prove she was an 'author' who could really 'write'. An editor working on a college newspaper could have vastly improved the book with a red pencil and some strong guidance.
Third, this is based on a blog. This means there is only one subject: the attention-starved author whose exhibitionism creates a completely unwarranted sense of self-importance in the author's own mind and heart. The book is not about cooking, not about learning, not even about working through Julia Child's classic cookbook, it is about Julie, and nothing but Julie. I can completely understand why Julia might not have liked the blog: what I wanted to see was, 'Here's what I am going to cook next, here are my adventures and misadventures encountered along the way, here is how it tasted, here is what I learned about cooking and about myself.' That is most emphatically not what this book is about. Julie was given the nickname Sarah Bernhardt from a very young age because she has evidently been given to histrionics and tantrums since birth--that's pretty much what the book is about.
Having now confirmed most of the negative appraisals given by those reviewers who only gave this book 1 or 2 stars and probably wished they could have given it zero, how do I get from here to a 4 star review? Let me try to explain.
This is, quite inadvertantly, a very adult book. Granted, the language is that of a foul-mouthed teenager, the attitude that of a petulant child, the insights, well, there really aren't any. I would not recommend this book to any under 25, maybe even under 30. Imagine a memoir written by a substance-abusing street person who once worked on Wall Street. This is how grim this book is.
Julie Powell is not a drunk, or a drug addict; she is a reasonably sane, functioning adult, but she is deeply damaged, still trapped in some childhood drama that we, even now, know nothing about because she lacks the insight to see it for herself yet.
But, even though I did have to skip a few pages towards the beginning of the book that were just unbearable, the book became more compelling as I forged ahead for two critical reasons:
1) Julie actually learned to write as she was writing this book. A decent editor would have pointed this out and cleaned up the amateurish, exhibitionist beginning to match the more maturely written last half of the book, but, alas, Julie was ill-served by a project manager. Offhand, I would say the most egregiously bad writing is confined to the first 30-50 pages or so, and seems to disappear almost entirely after page 80.
2) The growth I was hoping to see Julie undergo during the project only really began to happen afterwards, while she was writing this book. But she did grow as she wrote the book, although in ways she is apparently yet unable to see. The book is funny, and episodic, and meant to be a number of things, but it is mostly grim and compelling. It's like watching an addict invent rehab on their own without ever even realizing it. When Julie says she was drowing and Julia saved her, she's telling the truth. She was lost in a crappy life, but the only thing that really made her life crappy was her, not her husband, family, friends, job, apartment, or city. All of the crappiness was entirely inside Julie, entirely of her own making, and it was only through committing herself to this journey that she was able to begin to drag herself out of her narcisstic black hole of misery.
Nora Ephron based her movie on two books that she essentially threw away in order to make up a beautiful dual story of personal growth. I am so glad she invented the character that Amy Adams realized so well. This book, on the other hand, tells the very adult tale of an immature, un-self-aware, miserable narcissist who began to work her way out of this nightmare of her own making by discovering the joy of learning that Julia so fully embodied. When she writes of this at the end of the book, she is still embarrassed to use the word 'joy', and this alone should give you an indication of how deeply damaged she really is. But, as you get further and further into the book, you begin to see the redemptive power of committment to a project outside of one's own neurotic orbit, a redemption that begins to work its magic even though Julie is too miserable and flawed to see anything more than glimpses of it herself.
The movie is cute, and funny, and wonderful, and light. This book is a grim memoir of redemption that is made all the more powerful by the fact that the author is too unperceptive to see what is going on herself. There is a turning point in the book, but it's hard to find because Julie never saw it herself, so she didn't structure the narrative around it. The book is life-affirming and ultimately very positive because it shows that the right mission, diligently followed, can save us despite our attempts to sabotage it.
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This was one instance where I preferred the movie. The book was mildly entertaining but also seemed to veer off into stuff I didn't much care about (like her friend's love lives). Also, Julie came across as unpleasant and petulant. And by the sound of things, I wouldn't want to eat anything out of her kitchen with all the mentions of cat hair and flies and stains and stink.But I can relate to feeling aimless and it's cool that she parlayed it into something big. So in that way, it was kinda inspiring.
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Top reviews from the United States
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Reviewed in the United States on March 13, 2011
Reviewed in the United States on May 4, 2009
Reviewed in the United States on August 7, 2023
This was one instance where I preferred the movie. The book was mildly entertaining but also seemed to veer off into stuff I didn't much care about (like her friend's love lives). Also, Julie came across as unpleasant and petulant. And by the sound of things, I wouldn't want to eat anything out of her kitchen with all the mentions of cat hair and flies and stains and stink.
But I can relate to feeling aimless and it's cool that she parlayed it into something big. So in that way, it was kinda inspiring.
But I can relate to feeling aimless and it's cool that she parlayed it into something big. So in that way, it was kinda inspiring.
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Top reviews from other countries
Olivier Comte
UNE FEMME SPIRITUELLE, UN ECRIVAIN AUTHENTIQUE
Reviewed in France on October 7, 2009Nick VanderMeulen
この何年間に読んだ本の最高 - Best book I've read in years
Reviewed in Japan on October 13, 2009
