Disinterring Julia

    I got over my hesitation and coughed up my own real money for a copy of My Life in France as soon as I could buy it from an independent bookseller rather than a soulless oligopolist. I'd expressed some of my reservations ahead of time, and it unfolded kind of like I'd figured. Unlike many MLIF readers, I'd recently read the full scale bio of Julia, and that memory was very much with me as I read.

    MLIF* is both more and less than it promises. As "my life"implies, these are memoirs, but "in France" comes in and out of focus as a structuring theme. As befits a culinary ambassador, the story spills over, and includes her Pasadena girlhood, Smithian hijinks, and the early days on TV at WGBH. However,  If you want a hungry American in France, Liebling or MFK Fisher** are better bets.  In a perfect world, there would have been full-scale memoirs, though a recent bio written with the cooperation of Julia is pretty close to a memoir. MLIF reads like stretches of the bio, except in first rather than  third person. Perhaps Jay McInerney can be persuaded to recast it in his patented second person style.

More critically, the voice here is not one Julia fans will recognize. There are two Julia voices--the cookbook voice and the TV voice. Before there was the PBS superstar, there was the book, and the book was more methodical than an undead John Wesley. Read Mastering the Art of French Cooking. There is an underpinning of what Iggy Pop calls a lust for life, but that book is great like Bill Belichick is great at breaking down film, not great like, say Prince jamming at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The TV voice is an exuberant patrician Gargantuanna, as familiar to us through constant imitations as through the thing itself.

The memoir voice is neither. I suppose that a red letter edition would send the wrong message, but in the wake of an assertion in the foreword by Child's great nephew/amanuensis/ghostwriter, that "almost all the words are Julia's or Paul's" but, "this is not a scholarly work, and at times I have blended their voices." It is very difficult to ascertain what is Julia, and what is not, which casts a Mme. Tussaud's pall over the whole enterprise, especially as interjections along the lines of "Yum!" (Loup en Croute) or "Hmmm" (darn that Simca) come thicker and faster toward the end of the book.

Ulitmately, as others have pointed out, the lack of introspection that made her such an appealing personality make her a bad memoirist. The various trials and struggles Julia and her husband face throughout their marriage are indistinct behind a scrim of WASPy sangfroid. In keeping with the post title, I had an experience with this book akin to what happened when cinetrix and I saw Tomb Raider. I'd looked forward to it, watched it, and it made so little impression that when I saw the movie on a marquee a day or two later, my first reaction was "I kind of want to see that" forgetting that I already had. Similarly, after I read MLIF and saw it in a bookstore, I was aware of looking forward to reading it before I remembered I already had. I can't quite say it's more brand extension than book, but it's close.

*Welcome, dyslexic perverts.
**Note that the MFKF's Art of Eating, an omnibus of five of her best books, is available from Powell's for a ridiculously low sum. Usually you need a gun and a mask to get bargains like that.

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