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.

[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.

[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.)

[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.

[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.

[lady-ganesh.livejournal.com]

Who text messages 'mwh?'

[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.

[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.