If you think of Julie Powell as she was played by Amy Adams in the film version of Julie and Julia, wipe that image from your mind. If you thought she had managed to pull herself out of her late twenties ennui by the end of that book, forget that hopeful thought.
Very early in Cleaving, Powell reveals that, following completion of the Julie/Julia project, she embarked on another "project"--an affair with an old acquaintance she calls D. The main feature of the affair seems to have been rough sex, with PDAs (in both meanings of that acronym) playing lesser roles. The saintly Eric, perhaps showing chinks in his halo, has embarked on an affair of his own. Yet the two remain mostly married (there are separations, official and unofficial, throughout the book).
Although the relationship with D ends soon after the events in the book start, she continues to obsess about him for a year, texting, calling, buying gifts, driving by his apartment, and gazing at his Facebook profile picture. Reading about that obsession is about as much fun as, oh, drinking blood (more about that later). Reading about the painful morass in which her marriage to Eric is mired is also not fun. Of course, lots of things aren't fun but are still useful, but Powell's reflections on her lover and her marriage do not, for me at least, offer any particularly helpful insights.
Note, however, that the subtitle also mentions "Meat," and meat is the topic that lifts some parts of the book. In the first two-thirds of the book, Powell is apprenticing at a butcher's shop in upstate New York, and the stories about the shop are mostly engaging (the detailed descriptions of how to break down various sections of beef/pork/whatever carcasses do get a bit tiresome after awhile--you can't always follow them without having a similar chunk of meat in front of you). Powell's attempts to make butchery a metaphor for other parts of her life feel strained, and the transitions between sections about marriage/obsession and meat are sometimes awkward.
In the last third of the book, Powell sets off on travels to Argentina, the Ukraine, and Tanzania. She studies meat practices in the various countries and enjoys the sensation of getting along by herself in the world. She drinks beef and goat blood and shares that raw goat's liver tastes like bloody cheesecake. (If you haven't inferred this already, the squeamish may find this book hard to take.)
I guess I should admit I'm not a fan of memoirs, but I didn't think of Julie and Julia as a memoir; nor are the sections of this book that are about food memoiresque (if that's a word) to my mind. As for the affairs, sexual obsession, and dysfunctional marriage--I'd much prefer them in a novel!
Favorite passage:
Sorry to say, but my favorite passages are the poems Powell's brother composed using one of those refrigerator magnet sets:
I wanted a life of
Blue skies shining
Diamonds and lusty
Spring shadows.
I have an apparatus
To produce sausage
When the flood comes
I will swim to a symphony
go by boat to some picture show
and maybe I will forget about you
Of interest:
A publisher's rep told the crowd at a Tattered Cover book group gathering that the film's producers asked that publication of Cleaving be delayed because they feared the revelation of Powell's affair would diminish interest in the film.
Julie Powell still blogs, under the title "What Could Happen? Musings from a 'Soiled and Narcissistic Whore'": http://juliepowell.blogspot.com/. Her most recent post mentions the death of Robert, the family dog.
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