Sunday, March 6, 2011

Cannonball Read 3 - Review #8 - Julie and Julia by Julie Powell

So I decided to read this book, too, after reading Julia Child's memoir, My Life In France, and of course seeing the movie Julie and Julia last year. I remember when the movie came out that a lot of people loved the Julia portion of the film, but felt like the Julie character, played by Amy Adams, was kind of selfish and unlikable. Well they will REALLY feel like that after reading the book. Julie and Julia is the story of Julie Powell, a 29-year-old secretary who is dissatisfied with her job and anxious about turning thirty, as she feels directionless and unhappy about where she is in life. She decides that she needs something to work for, a project, so she decides to cook her way through Julia Child's famous cook book, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, in one year, while writing about it on a blog.

It sounds like a great premise, and I tried really hard to like Julie, but honestly, it was a lot of whining and bitching and passing a lot of judgments on other people whose personalities we only get a shallow glimpse of from her perspective. She's constantly making these jabs at her Republican co-workers, but never really explains why they deserve to be put down, and she just kind of makes these vague "I'm a Democrat, they're Republicans" digs that don't really work. It also doesn't really flow. She'll go from talking about the sex lives of her single friends to making aspic for dinner, and I never really get where she's going. Is that really the best way to liven up the cooking stories? It just read really weird. I like a good memoir, but this wasn't one. She's constantly making life hard for her sweet, doting husband, and she recognizes how big of a jerk she is in many, many situations, only to keep doing it over and over again. Listen, you look like a bigger jerk if you're aware of how horrible you are being and do nothing to try to be better.

I was just really turned off by Julie, which isn't a great thing if the book is in her voice and all about her exploits. If I had just read her blog as this project was happening, then I probably would have just been reading funny stories about her cooking disasters and not as much of the misguided personal anecdotes and hissy fits. Whatever, it only took me a few days to read. Moving on.