I finally finished Julie & Julia the other day. I found it to be one of those books that feels like the end of something significant. You enjoyed your time in that world, with those characters. All throughout the time I spent with this book, I always looked forward to when I would have a moment to turn off the world and jump back into Julie’s tiny apartment kitchen with the meltdowns, the swear words, and the way she says the inside stuff aloud, giving us permission to be raw and imperfect and to let our unfiltered emotions run wild because we’re human, goddammit.
Julie Powell was very flawed. I am very flawed. Where once I would judge someone for, say, cheating on a partner, the years behind us put a lot of things into perspective, including how imperfect we all are. Each and every one of us will fvck up bad in our lives. In the age of hidden cameras all around us, more often than not these mistakes are being cast into the world in a split second, open for the entire world to vomit their judgment into the interwebs and rip that person’s character apart before even a moment to reflect on those seconds of weakness.
Julie was uncensored, and that was no more clear than on Twitter. One writer wrote a blog post that captured many of her tweets with likely some of her biggest feels. It’s a side of Julie that I didn’t particularly like, but I am torn because she has been an inspiring figure in my life since the release of Julie & Julia – the movie – in 2009, and even more so having now read the fruits of her blogging and cooking labour. She had such a way with words that motivates me to work harder at honing my craft.
I choose to remember the beauty that Julia brought us through her love of the written word, while remembering that the division we see in this world that is tearing families and long-standing relationships apart, is much bigger than her or I.
Julie is gone. Many people thought The Julie/Julia Project was crazy – even her mom at first – but she did it. She cooked all those recipes, played the doting grunt, blogged, and brought a lot of people together whether through her dinner parties, or her bleeders online. All of that hard work and a husband who believed in her and stood by her through some trying times, are the reason we have all of these melodic and often funny words, to cherish forever from books, to blogs.
In the final pages of Julie & Julia, I learned that Julie had written in her blog beyond September 2003, when she talked of writing about Julia Child the day she died at 91 years of age. August 13th, 2004. There were 4 entries that I had missed in fact. Not that I have read her entire blog yet.
You can read that eulogy of sorts via the link below. The calendar navigation will take you back through to her previous posts as well.
https://web.archive.org/web/20040816024614/http://blogs.salon.com/0001399/2004/08/13.html
“I have no claim over the woman at all, unless it’s the claim one who nearly drowned has over the person who pulled her out of the ocean.”
And I started crying so hard I had to stop writing.
Julie Powell, Julie & Julia
Thank you, Julie.