Julie & Julia: My Year Of Cooking Dangerously by Julie Powell

Food memoirs are my personal equivalent to Candace Bushnell or Danielle Steel: trashy and forgettable, generally read in one sitting. Beach reads, if I ever went to the beach. But unlike, say, (insane professional chef) Anthony Bourdain of Kitchen Confidential or (wealthy world traveler) Bill Buford of Heat, the Julie Powell who narrates Julie & Julia and I have a lot in common: we’re both nearing 30, living in NYC’s outer boroughs (though my apartment has fewer slapstick-hilarious plumbing issues), in love with men whose unending support and patience sometimes bewilders us, and trying to figure out what to do with our lives.

And while Powell and I have both gravitated towards food as both comfort and solution, our approaches couldn’t be more different. But I admire Powell because, even though she calls being vegetarian “stupid,” she acknowledges that honest, homemade, laborious food is worth the effort – even if her ingredients tend toward lardons and chicken livers, while I prefer e.g. olive oil and Swiss chard. And as a skinny girl who nevertheless thrills inwardly to any weight loss, I especially admire that in her weird, frenzied adoption of her “project” – to cook (and eat) every one of the 524 recipes in Julia Child’s Mastering The Art Of French Cooking in a single year – Powell remains undaunted by gaining twenty pounds of “butterweight.”

But for all her lighting-out-for-the-territory bravado, Powell’s writing style is self-defeating; while I want to read Julie & Julia as the coming-of-age narrative it clearly longs to be, she never wavers from her dashed-off, blog-cultivated prose, which, while engaging and often hilarious, undermines her story’s potential gravity. This passage, responding to a turning point in Powell's self-discovery, illustrates her overly casual tone - appropriate for anecdotes, but disappointing when things get weighty:

Oh, and I also know that when you’ve gotten a night of sleep, no matter how tear-stained, and then some bolstering from people who love you – or “love” you, or whatever – even if they’re people you’ve never met, sometimes the end of the world doesn’t seem like that anymore. Like the end, I mean.

Perhaps Powell’s project is too zany to be treated otherwise, but – and I have maybe never said this about anyone ever – I found myself wishing she’d take herself more seriously. I wanted moralizing and universalizing; I wanted her to extrapolate the fates of similarly flailing brainy and talented NYC 30-pushers (a group to which I squarely belong) from her own. For all her espoused carnivorism, Powell's story wasn't meaty enough for this vegetarian.