Julie and Julia - by Julie Powell (Paperback)

About the Book

Powell needs something to break the monotony of her life. So, she invents a deranged assignment: She will take her mother's dog-eared copy of Julia Child's 1961 classic, "Mastering the Art of French Cooking," and cook all 524 recipes in the span of just one year.

Book Synopsis

The bestselling memoir that's "irresistible....A kind of Bridget Jones meets The French Chef" (Philadelphia Inquirer) that inspired Julie & Julia, the major motion picture directed by Nora Ephron, starring Amy Adams as Julie and Meryl Streep as Julia.

Nearing 30 and trapped in a dead-end secretarial job, Julie Powell reclaims her life by cooking every single recipe in Julia Child's legendary Mastering the Art of French Cooking in the span of one year. It's a hysterical, inconceivable redemptive journey -- life rediscovered through aspics, calves' brains and cré me brûlée.

Review Quotes

"Hilarious and ferociously articulate. Powell wrote candidly and vividly about her antic adventures with Child's recipes... But perhaps more importantly, she wrote about food in a rich and raucous context, about putting pot-au-feu on the table through plumbing crises and existential desperation; about both Buffy the Vampire Slayer fandom and the difficulties of finding marrow bones."
-Entertainment Weekly

"Bracingly original, JULIE & JULIA is clearly the work of a writer who has reclaimed her soul." -People

"Powell is not a domestic goddess; she's emphatically, unembarrassedly a domestic mortal. But she is also a genuinely gifted thinker and writer about food." -Time

"You don't have to like cooking or French food to enjoy the zippiness of Ms. Powell's prose or to admire the purpose of her project....And she really did change her life. Now she's a writer. A good one."
-The Wall Street Journal

About the Author

After a misspent youth involving loads of dead-end jobs and several questionable decisions, Julie Powell, author of Julie and Julia, has found her calling as a writer-cum-butcher. She lives in Long Island City, Queens, when she isn't in Kingston, NY, cutting up animals.