Julie and Julia

I was very sad to learn of Julie Powell’s untimely death last week. I’m not sure why, really, other than just normal human sorry-to-hear-that impersonal sympathy. I never read her work. In fact, food literature is one category that I generally avoid. Of course I’m sorry to hear of anyone dying an unexpected death at age 49, but I felt this celebrity death a bit more than I expected to. 

Last weekend, during a spare 30 minutes, I started watching “Julie and Julia” on Hulu. I saw the movie when it first came out in 2009 and I remembered really loving the Julia scenes and not really loving the Julie scenes. Quick no-spoiler synopsis in case you haven’t seen the movie: It is based on both Powell’s eponymous memoir and Julia Child’s My Life in Paris, and it alternates between immediate post-9/11 New York City, where Julie Powell lived and worked as a mid-level bureaucrat; and Paris in the 1950s, where Julia Child lived an utterly enchanted life with her diplomat husband, Paul Child. Meryl Streep’s Julia, as I remembered her, was energetic and funny and full of infectious joy. Amy Adams’ Julie, on the other hand, was a whiny, anxious bundle of ridiculous neuroses. 

Well, now it’s perfectly obvious why I hated that character. Because it was like watching all the worst parts of myself, if only I looked like Amy Adams. 

Joking! Lol! Hilarious!

But in all seriousness, I watched part of the movie again, and as Johnny Cash once sang, I come away with a different point of view. I still liked the Julia parts of the movie better. Who wouldn't? Paris, international diplomacy at the height of the Cold War, glamour, mid century style, and what appeared to have been a perfect marriage vs. crowded subways, cubicles, yuppie bitch antagonists in place of friends, overwork, and domestic discord - really, no sane person would prefer Julie's life to Julia's. 

But the women themselves? Well movie Julie wasn't so bad. Yes she was whiny and spoiled and prone to temper tantrums but she was also compulsive and panicky and plagued with anxiety. 

Yes, I know. I keep coming back to this. She really is very much like me. I'd have freaked out over those stupid lobsters. I'd have dreaded boning the duck. Who wants to bone a duck for crying out loud? And I would for sure have pushed myself close to the brink of sanity to meet a fake, self-imposed, and entirely ridiculous deadline.

And besides, movie Julia (and I guess, real-life Julia) lived in Paris in a beautiful free apartment and she only worked because she wanted to. It was easy for movie Julia to be delightful. There would have been no excuse for her to be otherwise. 

*****

I never did read Julie and Julia, but now I think maybe I will. I’ll probably skip Cleaving (as the snotty-faced NYT called it, “Powell's sophomore and only other effort” - burn!) since I have already read one mercilessly honest exceedingly sexually frank overshare of a memoir this year. That one was enough for 2022 and it might have been enough of that genre for pretty much ever. But Julie and Julia is just my kind of thing - a memoir about a specific part of a person’s life and a story about a hard and exhausting though absurdly specific and quirky project. It’s a book about a person doing something that only she could have done. I’m going to finish re-watching the movie at some point, and then I’ll read the book and report back.