Julie & Julia by Julie Powell

The kitchen was a crime scene. Eggshells littered the floor, crackling underfoot. What looked like three days' worth of unwashed dishes were piled up in the sink, and half-unpacked boxes had been shoved to the corners of the room. Unseen down the dark throat of the trashcan, yet as conspicuous as tarpaulin-covered murder victims, were the mutilated remains of eggs. If the purplish-stained shreds of yolk clinging stickily to the walls had been blood spatters, a forensics specialist would have had a field day. But Eric wasn't standing at the stove to triangulate the shooter's position - he was poaching an egg in red wine. Two other eggs sat on a plate by the stove. These I had poached myself before Eric's and my impromptu reenactment of that scene in Airplane! in which all the passengers line up and take turns slapping and shaking the hysterical woman, with Eric taking the roles of all the passengers and I the part of the hysteric. These three eggs were the sole survivors of the even dozen I had begun with three hours before. One incoherent gurgle of despair escaped me, seeing those two pitiful things lying there, twisted and blue as the lips of corpses. "We're going to starve, aren't we?"

-Julie & Julia

I've been flipping through Julie & Julia, which I finished last night, trying to find a passage that would best demonstrate Julie Powell's writing style. Although the one above does not illustrate her tendency to go off on tangents (my head was spinning in the opening pages, when she seemed to be cramming in every thought that flitted through her mind), it does give you an idea of the level of drama you will contend with throughout the book. It's not just some broken eggs, oh no, it's a massacre.

On the one hand, I can sympathize with Julie. She embarked upon an extraordinarily difficult project: to cook the 524 recipes in Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking in a year, and to blog about the experience. She lives in a crummy (although spacious, and in New York that can't be dismissed out of hand) apartment, she hates her job, she's worried about turning thirty. These are all concerns that foster some sympathy.

But wow, is she ever melodramatic about it. See, Julie Powell is kind of neurotic, which I can identify with, but she is also super loud and in your face about it, which I find pretty obnoxious. To be fair, she is quite up front about acknowledging her own faults. However, after just the second or third tantrum over cooking, I felt my sympathy withering away. I mean, really. I guess I've never had a lot of patience for overly dramatic people, and I found her actions in a lot of instances to be so over-the-top as to be almost incomprehensible. Open to any given page and you're just as likely as not to find her crying over aspic or yelling at her long-suffering husband, Eric*. It gets a bit tiresome.

I feel like it's rather unkind for me to rag on Julie, considering she's a real person. But this is the way she chose to present herself to the world, for better or worse. Is it what she's like in real life? I have no idea. If you choose to read this book, though, you'll be spending time with this Julie, and to be forewarned is to be forearmed.

Onto the food. The food was interesting. I'm not really a foodie, and I'm certainly far from being a competent cook, so I was a bit out of my element. I cannot imagine making even one recipe out of MtAoFC, let alone all of them. To be honest, most of them did not sound that appetizing to me. There is a lot of offal involved, folks. And even putting that aside, it's hard to get excited about eggs in aspic. I mean, that's a culinary challenge, for sure, but what a nauseating result.

The food looks better in the film, which I saw prior to reading the book. Looking back, it was a great adaptation. Julie is played by Amy Adams, who has enough charm to temper her character's more obnoxious tendencies. And of course the real star of the show is Meryl Streep as Julia Child. Julie Powell invented little fictional passages from Julia's life and inserted them throughout the book; I didn't feel that they really added anything. The film gives a more fleshed-out account of how Julia came to cooking, and her struggles to first succeed in a male-dominated world, and then to work on the behemoth that was MtAoFC. I wouldn't normally say this, but in this instance I would recommend the film over the book. Not that the film is any masterpiece, but it's pretty enjoyable, and I predict it will cause far less eyerolling.

Up next: As I suggested in my last post, the food trend will continue, at least for a little while: Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain, which I have wanted to read for years. Exciting!

*In the film, Eric, played by Chris Messina, finds it irritating that Julie portrays him as so saintly in her blog. Obviously no one is perfect, but if Julie is being reasonably accurate in her book, the man put up with a lot of hysterical crying and screaming. A lot.