Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously

By Julie Powell

Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously is like a very, very rich dessert.

What, you didn’t think I could review a book about cooking without resorting to a lame food simile, did you?

Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously is Julie Powell’s account of her attempt to cook all 524 recipes in Julia Child’s famous Mastering the Art of French Cooking in one year. As I said before, it's like a very, very rich dessert — a dessert I wouldn’t normally order, but I got it for free¹ so I dove in with enthusiasm. And it tasted pretty good.

But even as I ate it, I felt vaguely guilty. Being a supremely rich dessert, it had no nutritional value; it was mainly fluff, really.² And as I scarfed it down, the richness started to get to me, and each bite got just a little harder to swallow. This didn’t keep me from finishing the dessert, naturally, but when I finally did polish it off, I was left with a mild feeling of queasiness.^{3, 4}

I have the feeling that this was supposed to be a gourmet dessert. You know, the kind they talk about on Top Chef, the kind with complexity and nuances and layers. Whatever. When foodies start talking like that, all I hear is Swedish chef-style “Bork! Bork! Bork!”-ing. Frankly, all those subtle nuances go right over my head (or over my tastebuds).⁵

All of which is rather ironic, since I just used a simile to describe my impressions of the book. Bah.⁶

Similes aside, Julie and Julia rests firmly in the category of “guilty pleasures.” Powell’s madcap culinary adventure is often funny, and equally mouth-watering and repellant. (brains, anyone?) It wanders much too often away from the food, which is where the book is at its best, and it's way too long, but it was generally fun to read. It didn’t change my life. I didn’t learn any life lessons. I’m okay with that. Every now and then, a little indulgence is a good thing.

Readers should note, however, that Powell curses a lot and holds some moral views that really bugged me

Footnotes for the symbolically challenged:

¹ I actually won it in a GoodReads drawing!

² This book is a fun read, but lacks real substance.

³ Powell speaks very frankly about herself and her friends and family, which makes for some juicy reading but left me feeling vaguely uncomfortable, like maybe I have no business knowing this much about people I don’t really know (I call it the “TMI Syndrome,” but I think this is becoming an increasingly rare condition in this day of tell-all blogs and reality TV exhibitionism).

⁴ Plus Powell is awfully annoying sometimes.

⁵ I am fairly certain that Powell was trying to write a book with deep meaning, weaving Julia Child and cooking with the events of her own life to make very astute observations about life, but I didn’t feel like taking the time to figure any of that out. For crying out loud, Julie Powell, you’re a self-proclaimed “government drone,” not Shakespeare!

⁶ Hence the footnotes, to atone for my hyprocisy.

The Glass Castle

A year ago for Christmas, my mother-in-law gave me this book. It looked intriguing but sat on the shelf for an entire year while I figured out how to fit reading into my life again after having a child. I finally read it over Christmas this year and found it fascinating. I, a very slow reader, read it in 4 days of nap-times and was sad when it ended.
The Glass Castle is a memoir - an astonishing true story about what I guess you'd call the "life adventures" of a girl raised by unique parents, and boy is that an understatement. The book begins jarringly with the author relating an experience of sitting in a taxi in New York City, on her way to a fancy party, and looking over to see her mother - a homeless person - rooting through the trash. I was intrigued and horrified from page one.
My husband likes to describe his own parents' parenting philosophy as "benign neglect." He tells all sorts of stories about he and his siblings fending for themselves, but they are nothing compared to what this woman and her siblings faced. Her non-conformist, drifter parents moved the four children from western desert mining town to town repeatedly while living in ridiculously tragic conditions. In one instance, right after the fourth child was born, the family moved and rented a u-haul truck. Since there was no room for the children up front, they all had to sit in the back with the furniture. Jeannette was in charge of holding the new baby in the dark in this truck for 14 hours - no food, no stops, no noise. Often they went without food, while their mother bought art supplies and their father bought alcohol.
When things got bad, the family headed east to West Virginia, where the father was from. Life did not improve for them. They lived in a house with no indoor plumbing, no working kitchen, no heat. The children slept in homemade bunkbeds with mattresses made of cardboard boxes. Jeannette's brother slept with a tarp over his head because the roof had caved in over him.
Interwoven through the chapters of this book are Jeannette's father's hopes and dreams and her mother's artistic visions. Her father was a visionary genius who planned to build a house for the family out of glass. When they moved to West Virginia, the children began to dig a hole on their property that would be the foundation for this great house, only to have it filled up with the family's trash, since they could not afford garbage service. Somehow, she creates an air of magic to her childhood. When there was no money for gifts, her father gave the children stars in the sky. They were voracious readers. They went demon-hunting in the desert to dispel childhood nightmares.
When you read this book, you wonder what century it took place in and marvel that it is a contemporary story, that Child Protective Services never took these children away, and frankly, that the children even survived. The book is told in a very unemotional, non-whiny way that is refreshing, and I think healing to the reader who is tramatized from time to time from the experiences she relates. It brings to light the conflict that many of us face when we grow up and realize our parents' imperfections. The amazing thing is, though, that no matter what we all have gone through, it is probably NOTHING compared to Jeannette Walls.