Cleaving: a story of marriage, meat, and obsession, by Julie Powell

[rachelmanija]

A memoir on butchery and, alas, an extra-marital affair, by the author of Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously. (Loved the original blog. Did not love the book adaptation, which lost all the charm and humor of the blog’s food-writing in a morass of uninteresting memoir.

Met Julie herself at a book event several years ago, and learned via the horse’s mouth that she has double-D breasts (“Damn hard to find a good bra when you have tits like mine.”) She was very drunk. As was I. As were all the writers present. We were at a promotional dinner with very bad food but fairly good wine. Two of the guys escorted her to her hotel room to pour her into bed. One returned with a dollar bill crammed down the front of his pants, and the other one informed us that Julie had felt up his cell phone.)

So, Cleaving! I did not get very far into this book, so I’m only giving my impressions of what I did manage to read before giving up. Julie gets interested in butchery and becomes a butcher’s apprentice. Meanwhile, she’s having an affair, and her husband is also having an affair, and she knows and he knows but this is not an open marriage so they are unhappy, and everything reminds her of sex and sausages are like penises and rib racks are like vaginas and gloves are like condoms and joints split like marriages and blah de blah blah blah. Guys, it is all so TMI! Here is a representative quote (she is getting text messages):

Two messages, two men.

The first: How’s the meat?

The second: Mhm.

Does everyone talk like this, in these codes? I decipher both perfectly. One pulls at me with a thousand strands of anxiety and obligation and love and solicitude and guilt; the other with a single knowing yank, the guttural syllable that brings me to heel.

To both my answer is the same: I’m on my way.

It’s not merely the thought of how turned off I would be by a lover texting me a Neanderthal grunt. (“Ayla! UNH!”) It’s that this isn’t sordid TMI alchemized into art. It’s just sordid TMI.

Too much boyfriend, not enough roller derby butchery.

Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat, and Obsession

Comments

[panjianlien.livejournal.com]

Bad things often happen when people get freak-lucky with a first book, then get offered a juicy contract for Book #2 so they feel they must come up with something... juicy.

[coraa.livejournal.com]

It seems to me that one of the pitfalls of a topical memoir (ie, a food memoir, a travel memoir, etc), or a stunt memoir ('for this whole year I will do X') is that, so often, the authors seem to forget that people are picking up the book for the topic or the stunt, and not because they're fascinated by the author's marital problems, car troubles, and/or ennui.

Or maybe it's just me, but that seems to be the most common problem I have with this sort of thing: too much boyfriend, not enough thing I picked the book up for in the first place.

(I also enjoyed the Julie blog better than the book, which also had far too little cooking and far too much... other stuff. Although not as much sordid TMI as it sounds like this one has, and in fact hearing that this one was more TMI than butchery is why I haven't picked it up. I think butchery is interesting! Her relationship problems, not so much.)

[viorica8957.livejournal.com]

Huh. My mom and I watched the movie (which was kind of dull, but Amy Adams and Meryl Streep were worth it) and when it was done, my mom remarked that Julia Child was actually a very unpleasant person IRL. Guess that goes for her counterpart as well.

[viorica8957.livejournal.com]

Or maybe it's just me, but that seems to be the most common problem I have with this sort of thing: too much boyfriend, not enough thing I picked the book up for in the first place.

It's not just you. I remember reading Anthony Rapp's memoir, and being ambushed by a description of his first blowjob (not to mention his cybersex adventures) in detail. Dude, I just want to read about the musical! TMI!

[coraa.livejournal.com]

I had a similar experience with House of Cards, a memoir about working for Hallmark in the card-writing department. It sounded like an interesting topic! And some of the greeting-card-writing bits were interesting and funny.

But the actual bits about writing greeting cards were only maybe 20% of the book. Another 20% was office politics, which technically was related to the work but which, in fact, was no more specific to greeting cards than to anything else. It could have been office politics anywhere.

But the real problem was that the remaining 60% was, more or less, about his problems with his fiance and his quest to have sex for the first time. I'm being a little unfair there, as there was some religious background issues and etc., and it wasn't written in a particularly skeevy way... but really, honestly, the entire central arc of the book was about him trying to get laid. Which. Was not what I bought a book about greeting card writing for!

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

I had this exact experience with this book.

So I flipped to the end to see how it resolved.

Answer: it doesn't! Status quo is exactly the same at the beginning and the end, except that she knows more about butchering!

Which leads me to think of the whole thing as even more of a colossal waste of time.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

I think the only memoir with an unpleasant protagonist I liked was Laura Resnick's account of overlanding through Africa. Which I liked because it was the total antithesis of all those "I went on a great journey and was Enlightened!" travel memoirs. She said right off that what she learned about herself on the journey was that she was a complete bitch when traveling. which I mmmmight have a bit of experience in. XD

ETA: The problem with the book is that I think a pre-copy-edited version made it to the printer, and it was full of typos. Oops!

[icecreamempress.livejournal.com]

The part that blew the top of my head off--and perhaps you didn't get to it--was the bit near the end where she cataloged all the street harassment she had received in a given afternoon as a way of bragging about how hot she was.

I swear to God, this happens in that book. (Here from james_nicoll's friendslist, not otherwise a weird LJ stalker.)

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

I didn't think she was unpleasant (in person) - she was actually pretty fun (albeit extremely drunk.) Her memoir persona is not so fun.

[coraa.livejournal.com]

I think you're right about being-read-as-characters, yes. It's something I struggle with when I write responses/reviews to memoirs, since I try, in general, not to make personal judgments of the authors... and yet with a memoir you sort of have to. I have come, finally, to the conclusion that if you write a memoir you're putting yourself in the public sphere, and therefore I don't need to feel guilty writing, "[Author] does a lot of stupid things and comes across as a bit of a twit."

And, along the same lines, while there's a certain extent to which a little self-absorption is defensible and probably necessary when you're writing the memoir, since it is about you... you don't want it to leak out onto the page. You-the-writer may need to be a bit self-absorbed; you-the-character-in-your-own-book had probably better not be.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Oh, I know who you are. ;)

Also, AIEEEEEE!

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

The persona of any memoir, like an online persona, is always constructed and filtered to some extent, and given that memoirs get polished, are presumably filtered and constructed more.

If I could give memoir-writers a single tip on how to do that, I'd say, "Don't forget that you have to be interesting to the readers, who are not inherently fascinated by you already. You have to make them interested by leaving out the boring and annoying bits."

I'm not sure that the persona has to be likable, though it's definitely a plus. But the persona has to be interesting and enjoyable to read about.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

...I am so not surprised.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

And on the flip side, Round-Heeled Woman, which is about a woman in her sixties looking for sex via classified ads, had too much dull backstory and job-related anecdotes and not enough sex!

My theory: many memoirists do not actually have enough content for a full book, and should really have written a long article. Hence the irritating padding and inability to stick to their announced topic.

[oyceter]

AIIIEEEEEEE!

[sienamystic.livejournal.com]

Yeah. I struggled my way to the end, and although I have a sort of mild fondness for Julie (why, I don't know) it just seemed like a very calculated airing of all her dirty laundry, without actually seeing her learn anything from it. Drama for drama's sake, which just gets tiresome, whether it's how she is in real life, or if it's the persona she takes on for the book.

[faithhopetricks.livejournal.com]

the other one informed us that Julie had felt up his cell phone

SNRK.

Also I totally misread your opening line and thought she had had an extramarital affair with a butch lesbian. WHOOPS.

rib racks are like vaginas

EW WHAT....should we all be happy she didn't go work at the Seafood Shop? http://www.theseafoodshop.com/

I wasn't a big fan of the blog, but I thought the premise was sort of fun and the writing was occasionally charming. Man, did the book seem to blow all that. I think part of the fun with ongoing blogs is just that, they're -ongoing- -- you really are seeing her trying to dish out all those recipes day by day. A book is a different experience. I think it's possible to give the _effect_ of day-by-day experiences in a book, but it requires a certain amount of skill wrt compression and condensantion, neither of which lend themselves to blogging.

[faithhopetricks.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the number of short padded 'books' based on magazine pieces has seemed to skyrocket in the past couple of years. It used to be people would write the piece, an editor would see it, it would get expanded into a book or they'd write a book based on it....now it's like the article IS the book. It's even worse when the book is based on a blog because blog posts are typically even more formless and shorter than magazine articles.

//is grumpy

[faithhopetricks.livejournal.com]

AUUUUUGH curses all those 'do-me feminism' articles

[gaudior.livejournal.com]

Slightly off-topic, but: I'm not sure how much patience I, as a cheerfully poly person, would have with someone whining at length about how she and her husband are both having affairs and are Very Upset About It. I mean, I might, because I wasn't always that cheerful about the poly. But if they never even think about the possibility of making non-monogamy work for them, since they seem inclined that way anyway, I might become annoyed.

[icecreamempress.livejournal.com]

No, that was the other weird thing. It was like they were addicted to the dramaz that were totally unnecessary. I was actually screaming "READ 'OPENING UP'!" at the pages of the book.

[lady-ganesh.livejournal.com]

Who text messages 'mwh?'

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Mhm.

Which somehow is even worse.

[vito-excalibur.livejournal.com]

My best friend lent me Julie & Julia. Apparently it got her through some tough times. Which, yay for whatever gets you through, but Julie was such an intolerable whiner that I never made it to the end. It didn't even make me feel better that I'm not as fucking whiny as her, because it just reminded me that there are people that tedious in the world. :/

[fourthage.livejournal.com]

I read a review of Cleaving a while ago in the Washington Post and somehow came away with the impression that it was a novel. Which made me do a double-take when you started talking about (I thought) the main character named Julie. But it's a memoir? About her infidelity? Oh. Well, okay then.

[coraa.livejournal.com]

If I got a text that said 'Mhm,' my response wouldn't be 'I'm on my way.' It'd be another three letters: 'Wtf?"

[foibos.livejournal.com]

The end should have had Space Marines killing everything.

[lady-ganesh.livejournal.com]

It is.

[lady-ganesh.livejournal.com]

Why bother sending a message when you have nothing to say?

[lady-ganesh.livejournal.com]

That's the other thing that bugs me about memoir: A lot of people don't seem to realize that people generally read books for a narrative arc, and/or character development. Not just to hear you meandering about when you and your husband were both screwing around and you learned to butcher.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

No! It's never mentioned! At least, not in the part I read. I kept thinking, "Investigate poly OR break up OR both: pick one!" But no.

[madam-silvertip.livejournal.com]

I'm fine with the sort of erotic writing that I would call "barnyard TMI" IF, and only IF, it is recognized that it works best in short sharp doses. Though it can be very powerful to approach sex from the point of view that we are but meat, literally bodies, and/or literally animals, after more than a few pages you know the drill and lose the thrill.

I think sometimes Peter Greenaway does it very well, and sometimes gets repetitive and zzzz.