Megan, aka Bookdwarf, writes about her troubles with the upcoming book Cleaving by Julie Powell. Powell is the blogger-turned-author-turned-Meryl-Streep-counterpart of Julie and Julia, the blog/book/movie. I read the blog, intermittently, back in the day; I read the book and taught part of it in my summer creative writing class; then took the class to see the film, which we discussed. The one thing we agreed on: we were all hungry afterwards.
Strangely, I wasn’t Powell’d-out; I thought the film did her a disservice, and hoped, when I saw Cleaving, that it would bring back the sassy, hot-sauce craving, searching and sometimes finding chick who’d come through in her writing. It didn’t, and after about 100 pages I gave up. Megan hasn’t, but, she writes:
I’m not enjoying it. It’s pretty much a rip off of Elizbeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love, but with a much less likable more self-involved author. It’s her memoir about her crappy life after Julie & Julia. She and her husband separate, get back together, she’s sleeping with someone else, she discovers she’s into bondage, she learns some butchering skills too. That’s the thread that’s supposed to tie it all together somehow. Also, she travels. See? Elizabeth Gilbert.
I agree, the butchery could string it together, and I wanted it to, but it didn’t for me. Partly because her writing was procedural rather than visceral — she’s good at listing the steps it takes to say, break down a half a pig, but not what it feels like or smells like. And — as far as I got, at least — she writes similarly of her relationships: descriptively but without the gooey sensory or emotional details.
I don’t mind the self-involved part — it’s her book, it’s her story. I would appreciate it if a woman could be strong-willed and make bad decisions and write about it without apologizing. It seems like we’ve had a long history of jerky male authors narrating their jerkiness — from Mailer to Klosterman — and making good fun of it. Why not Julie Powell?
But I think she fails to draw the reader to her side. I think the narrative distance she keeps never allows the feeling of genuine intimacy. We aren’t enlisted. We aren’t seduced.
And I wonder how much this is connected to her time as a blogger. Did her original blogger persona come between her and a kind of narrative truth?
