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

[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]

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!

[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.

[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