Day Four: Julia Child by Laura Shapiro

Today's post is a book review, since I conveniently finished Laura Shapiro's biography Julia Child last night in bed.

It's a slim little volume, very lively and warm, and feels personal even though I don't think Shapiro knew Julia, she just spent a lot of time with her archives at Harvard. Lots of quotes reveal Julia's saucy personality, but while Shapiro clearly admires her subject, she isn't too dazzled to point out, for instance, that Julia, although very liberal, had a history of making fun of gay people.

I refer to her as "Julia" because, as Shapiro details in the wonderful chapter "The Performance of Me," the entire country felt such an uncanny intimacy with this woman that no one ever called her anything else (except her husband, who sometimes favored "my little wifelet"--rather ironic, since the "wifelet" was over six feet tall.)

Julia McWilliams was raised in Pasadena, chafed against her father's right wing tendencies, and attended Smith College because her mother, Caro, was a devoted alum. I wish I could say that Julia shared my goofy fondness for her alma mater, but not so much. She did, however, design the menu for new president Mary Maples Dunn's convocation when I was a sophomore, which was pretty exciting for those of us in attendance.

She met Paul Child in the foreign service and didn't marry until her mid-'30s, and didn't start cooking until after that. They were living in France at the time (where they stayed until he retired, eventually settling in Cambridge, MA) and she was bored, loved food, and wanted to be a good wife. To Julia, French cooking wasn't just about food, but about the preparation and the attitude. Although she loved all kinds of cuisine, she advocated preparing everything like French food, with the finest ingredients and no shortcuts. (Much later, she even wrote to McDonald's to complain they'd ruined their delicious fries when they stopped using beef tallow.) She was playing to a tough room initially, since she wrote her famous cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, at the height of the packaged food wave.

Most people remember Julia Child from her television shows, and it really is remarkable that her career spanned 40 years and a handful of shows, all of which featured her front and center, doing what she did best, and that was not cooking. Her greatest talent was feeling like a friend right through the television, her infectious glee about food, her good-natured recoveries from food disasters, her wry humor, all part of the delicious package.

Something that has interested me about Julia since I read My Life in France, her autobiography, is the fact that she was childless, and not by choice. While a disdain for housewives and their unwillingness (in her perception) to focus on food preparation comes through in her writing (and Shapiro's, too) I also sensed her regret at times. Yet a sort of "Oh well, never mind, I've got so much to do!" attitude tidies up the subject even when someone of an analytical bent (which Shapiro clearly is) discusses the situation. My heart goes out to Julia, even though I can't know if she ever made peace with not being a mother.

My favorite bit about Julia is that, while I want to describe her as "determined" when it came to finding her first book a publisher, I have to conclude that the process simply reveals who she was. Two publishers rejected the initial draft because they saw no audience for it and suggested she cut drastically and include more convenience foods. But did Julia shrivel up and admit in her heart that they were right, that she was chasing an unrealistic dream, yada yada yada? She did not, even though she had absolutely no experience writing a book. And not only didn't she give up, she politely refused to make anything but cosmetic changes. I laughed out loud when I read that the first draft she and her life-long cooking partner Simca submitted to Houghton Mifflin "was over 600 pages, and that covered only chicken and sauces." That is too fabulous! And Julia made no apologies. In fact, she cheerily suggested that the book could be a series, wherein they'd publish another 600 pages every couple of years or so.

One could conclude that she was simply deluded, or narcissistic, except that she was RIGHT. Ultimately, most of the women in the United States would buy the book (finally coaxed into being by a sympathetic foodie editor at Alfred Knopf) and its success would lead Julia shortly thereafter to her lifetime on living room screens. I have to respect that she never let anyone else's opinions about her passion change her one bit. That is pretty great inspiration for the rest of us, whether we ever learn to make coq au vin or not.