Book Review - Julie and Julia

For a few months there, it seemed like everyone was reading this book.  Then, just as suddenly, everyone was going to the movie.  And liking it!

I wasn't tempted to do either, and felt a bit out-of-sorts being so out of vogue.  Still, I knew I didn't care to read about  a woman who had tried all of Julia Child's recipes found in "Mastering the Art of French Cooking."  Frankly, french cooking turns me off and besides watching Dan Aykroyd satire Julia Child on Saturday Night Live, I didn't really know much about the famous chef either.

When this book showed up in my mailbox as part of a long-distance book club I joined, destiny laughed in my face at my attempt to snub a popular book.  So I read it.

Turns out, my first instinct was the right one.

Julie & I (did you see what I did there?  Huh?  Clever, eh?), the woman who fundamentally hates republicans, seems to have little respect for a husband who amazingly seems to respect her, and who can't seem to formulate a sentence without flaunting her I-will-throw-in-the-F-bomb-anytime-I-feel-like-it mentality, would not get along.  While we both like to blog, and probably both imagine ourselves to be a lot more important than we actually are, we have very little common ground.

For some very undeveloped reason, she begins an obsessive journey to cook all of the hundreds of recipes found in Child's recipe book within the time frame of one year.  Never mind that it means she will have to eat things she finds disgusting, feed meals to her friends, family and husband that they find disgusting, and spend money she doesn't have on ingredients she can't find - she apparently just has to do it!

Lucky for her, her meaningless obsession turned into a lucrative book deal and even more lucrative movie deal.  We should all be so rewarded for focusing the majority of our time and energy on something that benefits so few, if any.  I think, however, that because her story got made into a book, and, crazily, a movie with huge movie stars, her experience was validated as meaning something.  It changed her.  I guess.  Gave her something to proudly say she accomplished.  I guess.  Gave her free range to cuss and cuss at anyone who minded that she cussed.  Definitely.

O.K.  I'll admit it - her tacky swearing in print annoyed me.  Why in the world would someone writing a memoir, with time and a thesaurus and editors on hand, choose to use such a trashy and limited vocabulary in something that will last well beyond their own short life?  I get it in novels.  Some characters think and speak like that.  I even get it in non-fiction.  Hey, much of life is R-rated.  But, in a memoir?  In a I'm-a-pretty-funny-lady memoir?  That's the word you want to use when you have time and plenty of alternatives available?

In the end, I just wanted it to end.  I wanted to know how and if all the eggs and cream and butter and bone marrow mattered.   They don't.   I was tired of reading about her messy and absolutely nauseating kitchen (maggots, people.  Maggots.)  I was really, really tired of Julie.   Not Julia, because she's hardly in the book, but Julie.  That last page, which took awhile to get to after a couple of cruel false endings, couldn't come quick enough.

I still haven't seen the movie.  I've heard it is better than the book.  But, I'm weary and untrusting now.  Meryl and Amy might manage to salvage this story, but I'll never know because I'm not going to succumb a second time.

Once was enough.