The Dinner Files

I finally saw it. I was downtown anyway (serving time on a tasting panel during which I am always surprised at how interesting it can be to taste, say, 12 kinds of canned tomatoes), the afternoon spread before me, and I had started to find myself unable to participate in food-world conversations because I hadn’t seen it. I popped into a matinee all by my lonesome and had a delightful time. I laughed, I cried, and the contrast I felt reading the two books on which the movie is based – Julie & Julia and My Life in France – sure showed up on-screen.

Here’s the thing: If a person is a food writer and didn’t like, nay *LUV*,  Julie & Julia, the book, people will very quickly shout “sour grapes.” I assure everyone that this particular food writer has absolutely no sour grapes vis-a-vis Julie Powell. A food writer publishes a book, it sells well, and she gets a movie deal?!? To me this is extremely good news.

On top of that, I love the whole idea of teaching oneself to cook by cooking one’s way through Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Genius. To write about it? Brilliant. Doing so in a year? Maybe a bit gimmicky, but gimmicks often work and lord knows I respond very well to a set deadline myself. To then whine and and have “melt downs” through most of it? Not so appealing to me. I read her blog sporadically and found it sometimes funny but more often almost aggressive in its need to regurgitate frustrations. Reading the book bummed me out as – dish after dish, page after page – Powell sucked all the life out of cooking. The joy, the pleasure, the contentment I find in the kitchen seemed to play such a small role in her project, especially for someone who started off loving cooking for so many of the same reasons I do: the predictability, the sense of accomplishment, the feeding and bringing pleasure to others. Those comforting, satisfying elements of cooking seemed to slip through her fingers with each dish and I felt sorry for her. I wanted to grab her by the shoulders, give her a good shake, and tell her stop crying over un-set aspic.

(That said, I think I’d like Powell in person. If I knew her I’d be able to say “stop whining” or “these ‘melt-downs’ of yours sure have all the markings of toddler-esque temper tantrums” and then we could laugh it off and enjoy our cocktails and boeuf bourguignon.)

Compare that to Julia Child, who meets disappointment and even failure with a “tant pis” and a sigh before she gets back to work. It is probably the Midwesterner in me, but I like that in a person. I found My Life in France inspirational. Child didn’t even really start to learn to cook until she was 37, which is how old I was when I read the book two years ago.  She then worked like a dog on her first book for nine years. She recounts those years of her life with love, with humor, with joy even as her husband was shuttled between diplomatic assignments and they faced the disappointment of not having children and she faced endless professional roadblocks, back-tracks, and frustrations.

Child’s can-do, plucky nature, her true joie de vivre that grows out of taking pleasure in small, quotidian things, her sentimentality about people rather than places or things, her ability to laugh at herself and soldier on are, quite frankly, the things about myself I like the most. They may not be, as they are in Child, my dominant traits, but I sure wish they were.*

That is, perhaps, why I didn’t love reading Powell’s book: I whine, and fret, and take my frustrations out on those around me, too. The problem is that I abhor that in myself. Reading about someone else doing it doesn’t help. For the same reason I’ve never found support groups helpful, I don’t find comfort or even much humor in reading about someone else behaving in ways I don’t particularly like in myself. It doesn’t help me to know I’m not alone. In fact, it depresses me further. It makes my problems seem larger, not smaller.

Powell’s and Child’s characters were highlighted – one might even say caricatured -  in the movie even more than in their books. Would I have preferred a Meryl Streep-as-Julia Child bioepic as so many others have asserted? Sure. But I also found that being the archetype of someone trying to find her way had the interesting effect of making Powell more sympathetic. The editing necessary to turn a book into half of a movie did her a favor. Isn’t the criticism of blogs (and books based on blogs), after all, that they ramble, that they navel-gaze, that they need editors?

I would love an editor. For my blog, for my closet, for my life. In the meantime I’ll re-read My Life in France. I picked it up last night, just hours after seeing the movie, needing another hit of pluck and verve and stick-to-it-ive-ness.

* I should also note that I sometimes also share Child’s less-impressive pride and her impatience with those not as “serious” as herself. On top of that my dashing husband, much like Paul Child, seems to think his wife can do anything she puts her mind to. To stack matters in his favor, he also looks a fair amount like Stanley Tucci (with a bit of Al Pacino and Andy Garcia thrown in for good measure), which directly contributed to his Dinner Files moniker.