Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    

We're delighted to welcome back to the Inkwell Julie Powell. Julie visited
in the wake of her one-year sojourn cooking her way through Julia Child's
classic cookbook and blogging about it all. She had a book contract in
hand and a new diet underway. Now, the book is in stores and homes,
she's back from  tour and ready to let us in on things here.

Helping lead the conversation are Well members Jill Davidson
and Eric Gower.

We asked all three to tell us a bit about themselves.

Julie replied:

After nearly ten years of mire and temp work, I now suddenly find
myself an author - of a couple of things, most amazingly a book: "Julie
& Julia" (plus subtitle that goes on for days), my account of the year
I spent cooking my way through Julia Child's "Mastering the Art of
French Cooking," an insane assignment for someone who can't really
cook, but one that wound up changing my life in a lot of ways. For
instance: I now get paid to sit around in my pajamas and type on my
laptop, which is a far, far better way to make a living than Xeroxing.

My husband Eric and I still live in Long Island City, in the same
crappy apartment, with our three cats, 110-pound dog, and snake, Zuzu
Marlene.


Jill said:

I'm a 38 year old mom - 2 kids now, and in March 2006, 3 - and educational
writer who cooks every day. I have 2 cats and 100+ cookbooks and live in
Providence, Rhode Island (been here a year after 13 years in San
Francisco).

The top three occupations of my brain in order: 1. my family; 2. food and
cooking; 3. (still important but way, way back in the pack) work.

What I do for that work: I am the Publications Director for the Coalition
of Essential Schools (www.essentialschools.org), a national school reform
organization. Though it isn't writing about food, I do like it a lot. I
spend much of my time writing and editing our quarterly journal, Horace.

What I cook and eat: most recently, dinner tonight, lentils with onion and
carrot and potato with ricotta salata and buttered egg noodles on the
side. Lately:  lots of Thanksgiving and resulting leftovers. In general,
the circumstances of my life don't call for the time consuming or far out
but I do my best to mix it up and cook pretty widely and decently.

And I love to read about food about as much as I love to make and eat it.


Eric told us:

I lived in Japan from 1988 to 2002. Most of that time was spent doing
editorial/ghostwriting work, but I cooked a hell of a lot too, and
wrote a book ("Eric's Kitchen") for home cooks there, an attempt to get
them to use classic Japanese ingredients in new ways. Then I wrote
another one, this time in English ("The Breakaway Japanese Kitchen"),
for home cooks OUTSIDE Japan, urging them to use Japanese ingredients
in unorthodox ways. I've just finished a third cookbook, and this time
I've finally managed to (largely) wean myself from Japanese ingredients
(I've added lots of Indian and Middle Eastern ones into the fray). I'm
happily based in SF.


Welcome, you three!
  

    
Hello Julie! You are no doubt tired of talking about this by now, but
for
people who haven't read the book, could you kindly give us the basic
lowdown on how you got the idea for the Julia project? It's easy to
see
the appeal of going through the Julia oeuvre of dishes one by one, but
what made you want to blog it? Had you blogged before? 

So many questions, but we'll take them a few gulps at a time. 
  

    
Well, "got the idea" implies rather more powers of reason than I
employed.  It was more like a panic attack.  Mothers lift up two ton
automobiles to save their babies, depressed 29-year-old secretaries
embark spontaneously on insane projects and blog about it.

Actually, I didn't really even know what a blog was at the time.  This
was 2002, when blogs hadn't really reached the mainstream in much of a
way.  It was my husband's idea.  We just had a sort of Reese's peanut
butter cup moment.  You know, "Hey, your frustrated desire to write is
in my longtime ambitious amateur cookish-ness!"  It just kind of went
from there...
  

    
So do you think that if you hadn't had the blog, you would have finished
the project fully within the year? My sense from _Julie and Julia_ is that
you had your own motivation in a real way, and you had Eric and others as
witnesses, but the blog gave you an extra - maybe sometimes crucial - push
when you felt ready to hang it up and stop.
  

    
And about the panic attack method of career development: it's not cooking 
related but I really love that you are so candid about why you embarked 
upon this. My own career trajectory has been guided by impulse decisions, 
desperation, and a persistent flight from working in actual offices.

I work a lot with high school students as a mentor, kids interested in
becoming writers. Lucky for me, adolescents are very busy focusing on
their very important own selves and rarely have I been asked why I became
a writer. A good thing, because I am hard pressed to describe in ways that
seem educationally sound why I do what I do. The real reasons, like - I
actually do love to work, but I hate to work in offices and urgently need
a job that allows me to be alone. My need for alone time is huge and as a
mother of 2 soon to be 3 kids I write for a living just because it pays
for the alone time - never quite seem educationally sound, you know?

Your descriptions of your office culture and circumstances totally 
resonated with me. Now that you're free of that, what do you think. Happy? 
Do you miss aspects of daily work life with others? Are you just so happy 
to have the writer's life now? Eric (and others), how about you?
  

    
There's absolutely not question - without the blog, there'd have been
no Project.  There was no way I could have known when I started what a
boon the blogging medium would turn out to be for me.  First there was
the dailiness and quotidian nature of it.  I didn't have to know where
I was going, I didn't even have to edit - I just had to get my task
done for the day, and let it go.  

And then, of course, there were my readers, who I really credit with
being huge contributors to the project.  They weren't just cheerleaders
- though they were that.  But even more important, it was through
their comments, and their enthusiasm, and their stories about their own
lives, that I really was able to understand the significance of what I
was doing.  That my experience, particulars aside, was a universal
one.  

And no.  I never ever ever miss being a secretary.  It's true that
it's an adjustment, learning to work under your own steam.  But if
that's the worse problem I have, I count myself lucky.  My whole life
is devoted now to never having to work in an office again.
  

    
Readers reading and commenting in real time is such a strange new
concept for writers. 

But let's get right down to it: I wanna know about aspic! You had to
make/use a bunch of it for the project; I can't think of a single
ingredient that's fallen more out of favor. How could anyone ever have
enjoyed this vile substance. 
  

    
And: which dish has become the standby, the one you now make more than
any of the others?
  

    
(Note: offsite readers with comments or questions can send them to
<inkwell@well.com> to have them added to this conversation)
  

    
eagerly awaiting Julie's answers -- and chiming in to say, in
WELLspeak: I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE the book.
  

    
hi julie, welcome tho the WELL, looking forward to reading the answers
as well.  (jilld) and (gower), thanks for leading this!
  

    <scribbled by slf Sat 3 Dec 05 05:26>
  

    
Okay - sorry for the delay!  Whew, this has just coincided with a hell
of a bad day....

Anyway - 

1) Aspic.  Don't know.  Sucks.  Bone marrow jello was always a bad
idea - perhaps in a decade they'll feel the same about, I don't know,
balsalmic vinegar ice cream.

2) Standby recipes....  Well, now that it's cold I do head back from
time to time to the good old classic JC stews - boeuf bourguignon, coq
au vin, etc...  And I like my baked cucumbers.  But honestly, my love
for MtAoFC has very little to do with the recipes themselves.  It's a
book I like to breathe over.

Oh, and the liver with mustard.  Yummy!

(Ack!  SO many questions!!)

3) I could not imagine someone else I might cook through besides JC. 
First of all, the structure of MtAoFC is such that you really do
believe you could systematically learn to cook by working through it. 
And you can.  I can apply the techniques that I learned during that
year to Thai cooking or hamburgers or whatever.  But more than that, I
find the book mesmerizing as literature.  It's a book I can read over
and over.  No other cookbook has ever spoken to me like that.

Except maybe Roy Andries DeGroot, Feasts For All Seasons.  That's a
nutty one!

4) Making a living as a food writer beats making a living xeroxing by
about a thousand miles.  It is true that I never particularly thought
of myself as a food writer, and that I think there are a ton of people
out there who know more about food than I do and therefore writer about
it better.  I think I write more as an eater, and my interest in food
is just that it's one of the two or three things that everyone in the
world does every single day.  Perhaps next I should write about my
bowel movements, but I'm not yet the writer to do that well.

5) My first impulse, OCD sufferer that I am, was indeed to cook
through the book from beginning to end.  Luckily I uncharacteristically
considered that option for more than ten seconds and realized I'd be
eating bavarians for two weeks, and that I'd never be able to pay the
rent once the veal roast section came up.  So instead I decided to cook
each chapter consecutively, but to bounce around between chapters.  So
- first soup, first chicken, first meat, etc....  That method worked
out pretty well, except that it lulled me into a false sense of
security.  It was all so easy at first!  Ha HA!

Will post now in place of taking a breath, before embarking upon the
last few questions....
  

    
Okay...

6)  Kids??!!!  Holy shit, no!  No kids.  I cannot IMAGINE doing this
with kids.  It nearly killed my cats!  And we certainly ordered our
share of Domino's pizza - which is NOT, contrary to rumor, my favorite
pizza.  It is simply the only pizza to be had in Long Island City at 10
pm, once the bernaise has curdled.

My husband was a fucking angel, it must be said.  He was the only
person in the universe that didn't think I was totally insane.  Little
did he know....

7) Well, rumor has it that JC was nonplussed by the project.  I like
to think that if she had understood what it was I was doing, how
grateful I was to her for teaching me how to live bravely and how
central her book became in my life, then she'd have approved.

8) I have no plans to become the Cook Through the Cookbook lady, and I
don't know that anyone would want me on a TV set kitchen.  There's the
language issue for one thing, and imagine the liability insurance!  My
main goal is to keep out of the government offices by writing books,
both about food and not.  I'd like to churn out a novel, I'd always
really thought of myself more as a fiction writer before the Project
started.

Whew!!!
  

    
Do you think blogging will be part of your writing MO from now on? It
seems like it was such an integral part of this book, that your
"bleaders" provided such fuel for you. I wonder if any big-shot fiction
writers are blogging about works in progress? And how did your editors
at Little Brown feel about it? 
  

    <scribbled by slf Sat 3 Dec 05 05:25>
  

    
I don't know how the blogging will figure into my next books.  It's a
funny thing; with the first book it worked so organically, in part
because I wasn't starting off by trying to write a book.  I worry that
blogging with the intention of writing a book might stymie it somehow -
that I might start worrying about what it was I was writing, where I
was going with it; all the self-doubt stuff that blogging originally
helped me get over.  

And, you're right, I think my publishers are a bit concerned.  On the
one hand, the blog was what made my book saleable; on the other hand,
the blog's still out there, so there's some question as to why throw
down the $25 when you can read it online for free?  Not that I think
the blog and the book are the same, but you see the conundrum.   In
addition, there's just the fact that my notes, my raw material, is
sitting out there for anyone to read.  It's not quite but almost like
my first draft is out there.  Do I want to always have my first draft
floating out there?  Maybe not.

What I loved about the Project was the personal rapport I built up
with my bleaders.  I don't know if I could force that to happen again. 
We'll see.  One of my next projects - which I don't think I can go
into right now - is somewhat bloggable.  Perhaps I'll try to think of a
new way to do it...

While I was doing the project, I got correspondence with a few people
who were trying to start a blog modeled on mine, where they were going
to set themselves whatever goal and do it.  (The Lauren/Ina Project was
a particularly unfortunately named one....)  I think that's great - if
a bit limited as a literary genre.  But that's not the point, any more
than the point of my blog was to write a book.  The point is that a
blog can provide structure for you on the way to achieving something
you want to achieve.

As far as promoting the blog, I didn't really do anything.  Sent the
link to my friends, is all.  I honestly don't know how it caught on
like it did.  The blogverse was a smaller place back then.  Blogs are
viral things.

Embarrassingly, as far as the book contract goes, I didn't do a
goddamned thing.  An article was written about me in the New York Times
Dining Section, and boom! Book contract!  It's awful.  I didn't even
write a book proposal - I am thusly sweating over the one I'm writing
now.  Luckily, I had an agent, through another total fluke involving
the writer Elizabeth Gilbert and an email from Afghanistan, and she
sorted through all the offers I started getting at the end of the
project.  I just sat there, mouth agape.
  

    
Icertainly haven't cooked my way through MtAoFC in the last year, but
for the last 2 or 3 years I've been putting in a lot of time learning
cooking skills.  One of the things I have enjoyed most about your book
-- and learned something from -- is the "plunge right in" approach.  I
was really inspired (and, of course, somewhat horrified) by the passage
in which you end up trying to hack a marrow bone in half with a chef's
knife and then a hacksaw and ended up (as I recall) scooping out the
marrow with a spoon.  I would probably spend six months psyching myself
up for it, and another six months trying to figure out exactly what
kind of heavy cleaver to buy.

Reading your book has reminded me that sometimes it's ok to go "what
the heck!"
  

    
I can't even imagine trying to cook my way through the Betty Crocker
cookbook.  I'll have to pick up Julia Child sometime and see what you
mean about literature, though reading cookbooks or more general books
on cooking doesn't fire me up to cook, just to be hungry.

Did you finding yourself thinking how out of another world MtAoFC was?
 Not just the no-longer loved things, like aspic, but the processes
that were practically a full-time job of themselves, as a given to the
preparations.  I don't know if you've read _Kitchen Wars_ but the
amount of time that had to be given over to these sorts of meals was
mind-boggling to me.  And whenever you get to an answer ... it's
strictly my idle curiosity here.
  

    
Opening a bottle of cyber-champagne here for our deightful
interviewee. Corby Kummer, the *very* opinionated--and often
crotchety--food writer/Atlantic editor/devoted home-cook leads off his
Cookbooks review in tomorrow's NYT BOOKS section with a directive to
buy "Julie/Julia."
This is *major*!
  

    
wow! kudos, Julie!
  

    
aha! a new topic to whet my intellectual and viscereal appetite.
  

    
when i saw the topic about cooking great meals ala food experiments
for a family of 3 plus pets in a small cramped apt...I thought back
when in many old cities there are families that have cooked for
generations that way but we never hear from them....
  

    
that NYT book roundup made me realize how much your book must be doing for 
the sales of Childs' books. I hope her estate, whomever administers it, 
has thanked you, Julie!

I have the worst stomach bug today, will not go into futher details, am 
only now starting to contemplate food in any way other than literary
  

    
Ick, sorry about the bug, Jill...

There's no question that during the project I was cooking in a way
that not many people do anymore.  It's funny, too - it seems that in a
way, the more privileged our society becomes, the more that the
slow-cooked, intensely effortful meal becomes a signal of, well,
privilege.  Where once boeuf bourguignon was a peasant meal, was all
about making humble ingredients taste wonderful through time and
effort, now it's the wealthy who have the time and/or resources to
enjoy these meals, whereas the poor eat on the go fast food.  

I realize that I'm talking out my ass here.

The point, I guess, for me, was that I was taking far more time with
my food than most do today, and there was a sense of getting into
another way of being.  The pace of the cooking came to inform the
entire shape of my day in a way it just doesn't anymore for people.  It
was a very grounding feeling, actually.
  

    
>>The point, I guess, for me, was that I was taking far more time with
my food than most do today, and there was a sense of getting into
another way of being.

Me too. It's one of the things in life I'm most grateful for. An
incredible and increasingly rare luxury. 

Also amazing: the "lower" cuts of meat -- cheeks, short ribs, etc. --
are some of the priciest entrees in high-end restaurants nowadays. We
now pay more to be nostalgic about how good food used to taste.