Word: julia
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Writer Julie Powell's debut book Julie & Julia endeared her to aspiring cooks everywhere. The project started as a blog - chronicling the year she spent cooking all 524 recipes from Julia Child's classic Mastering the Art of French Cooking - and grew into a hit movie starring Amy Adams and Meryl Streep. By the summer of 2008, Powell was firmly ensconced in a new career as a successful writer and celebrity foodie. But Powell's offscreen life didn't follow the script. With her marriage falling apart, she took a sabbatical from her New York City home to learn...
...started learning butchery at a difficult point in your marriage. I am the kind of person who, in a period of crisis, tends to make my life crazier than it was already. The Julie & Julia project was all about that - a way for me to bring some structure to my life after I'd freaked out about turning 30. When I come to the point that is depicted in Cleaving, this difficult period in my marriage, I needed something to take my focus physically, mentally. Learning this art of butchery and spending hours at the shop was what I needed...
Once upon a time in the annals of women's stories, getting married was the fairy-tale ending. These days, marital ambivalence rules the literary scene. December brought Julie Powell's new memoir, Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat and Obsession (Little, Brown; 307 pages), in which the Julie & Julia author tells the sad, sordid tale of the recent years she spent butchering pigs, cows and her husband's heart. Meanwhile, in a New York Times Magazine story, writer Elizabeth Weil detailed her efforts to subject her "perfect union" to every kind of therapeutic scrutiny available in Northern California...
...Butcher a Marriage It would be much harder to hang up on Powell. She makes no apologies and no effort to be likable in Cleaving, a ghastly work of revelation without enough self-reflection. Soon after wrapping up Julie & Julia, Powell began cheating on the kindly Eric, that husband who dutifully ate her butter-soaked Julia Child meals for a year. Her lover and S&M partner was Damian, a former college fling with "Mick Jagger lips, and a weak chin." I am saddened that I have a clearer vision of Damian's masturbatory methods than of his actual appeal...
...postsunset is like, be advised: she takes us only to the altar. But these two writers share more than just marital ambivalence. It may be difficult to work up sympathy for best-selling authors who end up portrayed on the big screen by the likes of Amy Adams and Julia Roberts. (EPL the movie is scheduled for release this year.) Yet these women have been caged by the expectations of voracious publishers and readers. Their escape methods are different - Powell appears to be chewing her own leg off, Gilbert gently boring her captors into letting...