Review: Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat, and Obsession

Julie Powell, the author of Julie and Julia, in which she cooked her way through Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French cooking in a year and then blogged about it, is back with a new memoir, this one about her foray into learning butchery. Unfortunately, Cleaving is also about the collapse of Powell's marriage to the "devoted" Eric and her affair with the charming D, a story that she would have been better off not telling — though it gives her opportunities to use meat metaphors to explain the decline of her marriage.

Unlike Julie and Julia, which had a structure (one year, cooking through a single book) and a goal (finishing the book), Cleaving has no such structure, and no clear goal (other than making sense of her relationships and learning butchery) and the book suffers for it. In the first part of Cleaving, Powell works as an apprentice for six months at a butcher shop in upstate New York, learning the ins and outs of cutting up animals. In the second part, she travels to Brazil, Ukraine and Tanzania to ostensibly learn about their butchery traditions, but those only merit a mention — she devotes more time writing about making out with one of her guides in Tanzania and getting her BlackBerry stolen during an attempted rape.

What do Powell and the reader learn by the end of the book? That Powell may not have come to terms with her relationships by the end of the book, but that she has proven to be obsessive and crazy. She continues to contact D, even after he breaks things off, waiting outside his office building for an hour and a half to give him a present she bought while on vacation with Eric:

The Monday after we return from France, I pull my first actual, for-real stalking. I easily convince myself it's only fair, after I've tried for so long to reach him in all the more usual, less invasive ways. I warn him ahead of time, via text, that I'll be there, with a gift. I wait for an hour and a half outside the door of the building where he works. When he finally comes out, my face melts into a soppy smile that I can't prevent at the sight of him But he merely grimaces as if in pain and keeps walking...

Though Powell and Eric have remained together, despite a separation period, and still spend holidays together, Eric is having an affair of his own — though why he doesn't just leave Powell is difficult to understand — that is continuing at the end of Cleaving.

While some of the sections where Powell writes about butchery are interesting and entertaining, for the most part the subject matter is appalling — pages of wallowing over D, pointless recaps of her travels, trying to convince the reader and herself that Eric is actually important to her — and painful to get through. But the writing is also a travesty. Powell's book is disorganized, makes countless attempts to explain things through Buffy the Vampire Slayer (fine if you're a fan, but I've never seen the show, and it seems silly for so many of your life's philosophies to come from one TV show), and includes many, many juvenile jokes and asides. Reading Cleaving feels like leafing through a sexed-up adolescent's journal, which she abandoned writing halfway through and never intended anyone to read. Stick with Julie and Julia, which, if not the best-written memoir out there, at least has an admirable premise.

Review: Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage

In Elizabeth Gilbert's new book, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage, she begins her narrative at just about the same point she starts Eat, Pray, Love — firmly against the idea of marriage — but the surrounding circumstances in each book couldn't be more different. In the first book she is at the end of a disastrous first marriage and about to embark on a trip around the world to get over it, while in Committed, she is happily coupled with a man she met on that trip, yet unwilling to marry him since they both suffered through nasty divorces. A wrench is thrown into their plan to live unwed and happily ever after when Felipe is detained at at the Dallas airport for not having a visa; the quickest way to obtain one, to the horror of both parties, is through marriage.

The couple decide to go for it, but have to wait nearly a year before they're allowed to do so. Unable to be in the U.S., they head to southeast Asia, where they have little to do and Gilbert has plenty of time to warm up to the idea of marrying again. To do this, she decides to interview people she meets and read books about the history of marriage, in order to take a more intellectual approach to the idea. This is where the book is interesting — learning about marriage customs of the Hmong people, or that in ancient Rome two men could legally wed is pretty fascinating stuff. So is the story of Gilbert's grandmother, who suffered from a cleft palate and was allowed to obtain an education, travel, and have a job, since her family did not think she would wed. Lo and behold, she did wed, but in doing so, she gave up her autonomy. That's a point that Gilbert makes again and again — marriage only seems to hurt women, in that they earn less money than single women, their life spans are shorter, etc. But for men, they only seem to benefit from marriage, living longer and earning more money than single men.

Gilbert's own story does not pack the punch that her experiences in Eat, Pray, Love did. Being forced to marry the love of her life does not have the same emotional resonance that suffering a terrible divorce and subsequent depression does, and her narrative is less compelling. In the first memoir, there are real questions that the reader wants Gilbert to answer — will she move on from her divorce? How does each leg of her trip benefit her? But here, the only question is whether Gilbert will marry, a question we never doubt will be answered "yes," even when Gilbert is outlining how terrible marriage is for women. The main plotline doesn't have needed tension, and these sections just come across as awkward. It's lucky for her, then, that she includes as much research as possible, and disseminates this information in an approachable, casual way.

Gilbert says at the beginning that this won't be another Eat, Pray, Love, but it's a book that she needed to write and get out of her system. While it's nice to see some closure for Gilbert, I can't imagine that Committed is going to be a popular choice for book clubs.

Review: The Liars' Club

Has there ever been a truly happy memoir of one’s childhood? Most seem to look back at the usually sad events of one’s early life with wit or nonchalance, as with Mary Karr’s first memoir, 1995’s The Liars’ Club. The overwhelmingly positive responses — including being named to the New York Times Book Review’s top ten books of 2009 — to her third, Lit, impelled me to start at the beginning. Her second, Cherry, was published in 2000.

The Liars’ Club is named for a group of her father’s friends, who spun tall tales while drinking beer when they weren’t working in Texas. But the name comes to include nearly everyone who is part of Karr’s childhood, from the mother who keeps hidden her former marriages, to her grandmother, dying of cancer, who wishes to erase the years of lying. Her older sister Lecia is her fellow traveler, and the two live briefly with their mother in Colorado after she divorces their father. But they return to Texas, to a town that is a producer of Agent Orange, and a black spot on the cancer frequency map.

It’s a tragic tale, filled with death and drinking and rape, but an eloquently told one. Karr is a poet, and her prose takes on a poetic lilt that occasionally betrays the gravity of the scenes she’s describing. This downplaying is expected; the elegance with which it is done is not.

With series and sequels I always take a break between volumes, not wanting them all to run together, and I will here as well. And I’ll likely have to — I had to wait several weeks for The Liars’ Club to arrive on the “C” hold shelf at the Mount Pleasant Library, and Lit hasn’t made a single appearance on the “New Arrivals” shelf.

Julie & Julia

It isn't often that I see a movie before I read the book it's based on. No, I'm one of those snobs who refuses to see a movie based on a book and then if I do, I tell everyone "it's okay, but the book is so much better." (I especially like to say that to people who don't know that a movie is based on a book.)

But when I saw Julie and Julia in late July, I hadn't read either the namesake book or Julia Child's book My Life in France. I loved the movie, which intertwined the two stories, and decided that I had to read them both. Since Julia's book came first and she was the inspiration for Julie's project, it made more sense to read hers first, but then library due dates messed that up, and I had to go with Julie's memoir first.

I read Julie and Julia in two sittings, and I think the best way to describe the book is "cooking chick lit." It's filled with sex and drinking and drama unrelated to Julie's project of cooking her way through Mastering the Art of French Cooking, but then of course, there are the substantive and informative parts devoted to Julie's pursuit of mastering French cuisine. Julie's writing is conversational, casual and messy — I write this way to get my ideas down on paper, but then clean it up — but it works for a project that's personal and creative. Julie cooks to save herself and give her life meaning, and judging by comments on her blog, Julie's readers are nearly as invested as she is. So while personal, it's also a universal and inspiring project, and the kind of endeavor that I want to come up with for myself.

Each section starts with an imagined letter about Julia's life in France, and after reading the first one, I skipped over the rest. The book is already cute, and this just wanders into the realm of too cute. I'm going to save voicing Julia's experience for Julia herself and I'm hoping to get to My Life in France very soon.

I know a lot of you have read the book and seen the movie — how do you think they compare?