Low Budget Superhero

Julie Powell is annoying. I know, I know, I'm jealous. I should really give myself some more time to get over my jealousy before I write about her first book, Jule & Julia, now a major motion blah blah blah blah blah.

This chick is living the dream. Her stupid blog got her a book deal, and now a fucking movie. I would normally applaud a fellow diarist's success. But Julie Powell writes that she had never even heard of a blog when she started to cook from Mastering The Art of French Cooking and write about the prior night's cooking every morning. It wasn't even her idea, but that of her husband. "Of course I didn't know what a blog was. It was August of 2002. Nobody knew about blogs..."

Follow up:

Uh, speak for yourself, sweetheart. By August of 2002, mine was two years old already and yet still newer than that of the friend who inspired me to start one, and that of all HER friends on Diaryland. In fact, some of us have been BLOGGING so long that we won't even use the word BLOG if we can help it. Ya stupid bitch.

No. She's not stupid. But she IS a bitch. Seriously, read the book. You know how most of us have our days when we're, oh, you know, kinda cranky, need to be left alone for awhile. Or we hate our jobs that day and feel vulnerable because we're bloated and crampy. Or we're sad about something that hurt our feelings so we lash out at our boyfriend or snap at a service person on the phone. This Julie, she seems to live EVERY DAY with her cuntypants dial turned up to eleven. Out of nowhere, over nothing, she shrieks, she screams, she wails, she actually moans and then follows up with groans. She goes completely apeshit over things like...mayonnaise. "She's insane," I thought more than once as I read the book. She is the kind of crazy that makes men think all women are crazy.

In between the hysterics, she's a pompous tart who tells her husband to fuck off quite a lot, lacks basic compassion, and thinks she's better than her job. "I'm JUST a secretary," is a mantra throughout the book, and you can almost hear the eyes rolling from the words on the page. She demeans her job with the intent to show a life being wasted, thrown into sharp relief by several much-too-long descriptions of how young she was when she began to read, I guess by way of showing that she had started out with so much potential. Dude, some of us believe in a work ethic? It doesn't matter WHAT you do for a living. You get up, get dressed, show up at work, smile and do the best job you can do. There's about a jillion secretaries in the city who run the whole place. I feel like writing to her saying "Hey, self-described 'government wonk,' maybe if you weren't such an unmotivated slacker at work, maybe you wouldn't have been so empty and despairing and needed the cookbook project as a last-ditch effort to find some meaning in life, and I wouldn't want to smack you with a boned duck carcass right now."

Her husband is an absolute saint. If I were him I'd have pitched her whiny ass out that New York apartment window long before she got to the aspic chapter of Mastering the Art of French Cooking. For a number of reasons, including the aspic, which sounds like it's just the gelatinous muck that congeals around leftover meat in the fridge, except created deliberately and served up as a positively loathesome menu item.

All that being said, I realize I don't have to like Julie Powell to like the book. And I do like the book, a lot. Just because I never want to sit and talk with this person doesn't mean she didn't write a good story. I mean, hey, enough of us watched Frasier, right, and that character is a pompous ass, too. Alex in A Clockwork Orange. Lucy in "Charlie Brown." The Vampire Lestat. The Phantom of the Opera. Q from Star Trek. Hannibal Lechter. All major assholes, but we're still riveted to the story that spirals out around them. Humans are flawed. It makes us interesting. You do have to break a few eggs to make an omelet.

Speaking of eggs, Julie is not at all embarrassed about the number of harmless, perfectly ordinary foods that she had always refused to eat. I would feel stupid if I boasted like she does that I've never eaten an egg. Or mushrooms. Spinach. Olives. Carrots. Onions. Coffee cake. And not just "won't eat" the way bratty kids "won't eat." I believe she describes her attitude towards these foods as "terror." She was terrified of cheeseburgers. Because "cheese belongs on pizza, not hamburgers." Cheese? Cheese is...cheese belongs...you can't...you don't just take it upon yourself assign a specific job for all cheese, for everyone. Do you see what I'm saying about her being an opinionated little spore? Based purely on her being terrified of cheeseburgers, do you not already want to smack some sense into her?

I mentioned that she lacks basic compassion. That comes from the nature of her "government wonk" job and her offhand, even scornful approach to its duties. During the time of the cooking project Julie worked in the New York offices responsible for the aftermath of 9/11. She took phone calls from the public, worked in the department that would select the memorial to be constructed at Ground Zero, and on the anniversary of the date the towers fell, helped host a memorial. This last she described in snotty tones of having to get up early and "stand around" all day. After 9/11 I knew New Yorkers whose lives would never be the same, good people who cooked food for the clean-up crew and brought it to the site, who volunteered, who reached out to their neighbors. This Julie applies and gets a job at Ground Zero, yet she could barely be bothered to stifle her yawns. Maybe a clue lies in her terror of carrots and pearl onions -- she can't distinguish true horror from that in her own weird little head. Carrots terrify her. Terrorists, she could take or leave. Or maybe her offhand attitude is because she's a Texan who really hates New York, a "stinking, chaotic, life-sucking cesspool," despite having moved there deliberately. Go back to Austin if it's such a "verdant, peaceful paradise" by comparison.

Okay, so she's a New York hating, hysterical crackpot. But she does move the story along through her weird food issues, approaching the terrifying eggs and carrots, using cheese for more than just burgers, on to more adult things like live lobsters, and even further into exotic preparations including brains, kidneys and bone marrow. Though there's no shortage of freak-outs, each time she meets a new challenge, she grows a little. When she describes the simple, comforting potato soup it's used as a metaphor for what she needed to find in life, and makes a nice point about not confusing "simple" for "easy." I like that. It rings true. The eggs were a big deal, and an important hurdle to clear early. She had to, Julia Child wrote a French cookbook. It's French cooking, meaning it probably uses about a thousand eggs. Or oeufs. And Julie probably breaks or ruins two thousand by the end. But she does grow, and by the end she's no longer terrified. Of eggs. Or onions, or cheese. I don't know where she ended up on the coffee cake thing. Maybe that'll be in the next book.

Alright, so, final analysis?

Good book, makes a good read, I recommend it.

Don't much care for Julie herself, too much of a shrieky, hysterical drama queen and this I do not need in my life, even in book form. (Sorry, Julie. I know you're the kind of person who spends a lot of time Googling for new mentions, and I'm sorry that I wrote that I don't like you and called you crazy. You can dislike me back if it helps. And yes, I'm jealous, but that doesn't mean you're not a total crackpot.)

Overall, a grudging "good for her" on picking a husband with such a moneymaking idea, and props to her for finishing the whole cookbook and getting to leave her "wonk" day job to become a full time writer.