Title: My Life in France by Julia Child and Alex Prud'homme
Details: Copyright 2006, Random House Inc
Synopsis (By Way of Back Cover): "Julia Child singlehandedly created a new approach to American cuisine with her cookbook Mastering the Art of French Cooking and her television show The French Chef, but as she reveals in this bestselling memoir, she was not always a master chef.
Indeed, when she first arrived in France in 1948 with her husband, Paul, who was to work for the US Information Service, she spoke no French and knew nothing about the country itself. But as she dove into French culture, buying food at local markets and taking classes at the Cordon Bleu, her life changed forever with her newfound passion for cooking and teaching. Julia’s unforgettable story— struggles with the head of the Cordon Bleu, rejections from publishers to whom she sent her now-famous cookbook, a wonderful, nearly fifty-year long marriage that took them across the globe— unfolds with the spirit so key to her success as a chef and a writer, brilliantly capturing one of the most endearing American personalities of the last fifty years."
Why I Wanted to Read It: Some years ago, I saw and mostly enjoyed Julie & Julia, the movie that supposedly combines both this book and the book of the same name by author Julie Powell that chronicles her blogging and cooking her way through Child's famous cookbook. While most of the Powell material fell fairly flat (screenwriter Nora Ephron took serious liberties with Powell's book and basically reduced a quirky, genuinely interesting woman to a stock Ephron heroine, despite Amy Adams's typical masterful efforts), the love story, partnership, and ambitions of Julia Child were fascinating. I knew a little bit about her anyway, having Child fans in my orbit, but wanted to know more.
How I Liked It: First, it's worth noting how this book came about. It was published posthumously and she and her co-writer (the journalist Alex Prud'homme who also happens to be her husband's grand-nephew) worked pretty much up until the end, it seems. In a forward entirely his own, Prud'homme explains that he tries to have the voice of the book be solely Julia's, while explaining a bit how the book came to be. Julia Child had been sitting on book about her years in France since 1969 when her husband was sifting through the "hundreds of letters" he and Julia had written to his twin brother (Prud'homme's grandfather) in France. Prud'homme, being a professional writer, says he always wanted to collaborate with her but she resisted the idea up until less than a year before she died, where now in her nineties, she seemed to realize that if it didn't get written then, it never would.
He vividly describes their process and conversations, and while she was a performer, she didn't like talking about herself much. Prud'homme assures that all the words are either Julia's or Paul's (they apparently frequently signed letters "Pulia") and Julia worked as an editor on what he'd written, correcting and adding. He obviously didn't finish the book until after she had died, but gave his thanks to their editor who had worked with Julia for forty years. I mention this because it'll be relevant.
The book reads much like a conversation with Julia Child. There's not a great deal about Child's life before she arrived in France, just mere snippets to fill in, and a few pieces later on, as though she became more comfortable talking about it. Her impression of France and the many other places she and her husband visit, the people and relationships both professional and personal, she seems happy to express.
There's a sweet scene early on where her husband takes her to a French restaurant and she sheepishly admits after reading the menu that she doesn't know what a shallot is. It's a pivotal moment because rather than mock his wife or belittle her, Paul Child instead shares his own enthusiasm for French cuisine which plants the seeds for the legend Child would later become.
In an extended conversation with Child, you aren't going to get the cinematic aha! moments that abounded in the movie, but you do get thoughtful, interesting behind the scenes touches like Child's fear that the last thing 1950s America (with its Reddi-whip and burgeoning frozen TV dinner industry) would want is a French cookbook full of seemingly complicated foreign recipes. Or Child's revolutionizing the cooking show to be entertaining as well as informative, after watching a particularly boring, clumsy demonstration of the genre she would later all but pioneer (think for a moment if Food Network would even exist today without Julia Child's revolutionizing the celebrity chef as personality).
Her personal and professional partnership with her husband is as endearing and thoughtful here as it was in the movie. The union of two equals who truly loved what they did (and each other) is evident and it's charming, as is how much Child clearly missed her husband.
The downside is the book unfortunately does read like a conversation in the fact it goes a bit off in places, and dwells in others that causes the book to lag and drag occasionally. This seems attributable to the fact after her death, cutting down her material any further probably would've felt like a betrayal, and she herself wasn't around to edit the final product, leaving us with a bit of a mixed bag.
But for a conversation with Julia Child, it's still mostly an entertaining and intriguing look both behind the scenes and behind the star.
Final Grade: B
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