Gastronomique Interviews Julie Powell

Why, how did you start the Project?

I was unhappy as a secretary, and I was seeing my options narrowing all the time, and the routes I could take as being predetermined: left to law school and right to stay in secretary-dom. I could only see the trails that were already marked. The project made no sense, there were no ramifications that I could see, it was just somehting that, intuitively, I knew I could do to take my life back. I already had my eyes open, I felt that there always were opportunities. I was just too blinded to see them. That's what the book is about. Obviously my life has changed because of it, I am not a secretary anymore, I am paid to do what I love. The Project gave me the courage to see new ways of approaching life. It was a very Julia way of living. Julia did not satisfy herself with the status quo, she pushed herself to do something that was not done before.

Acting and writing are the two things I wanted to do. I was frustrated writer as well as an actor. The blog was my husband’s idea, I did not know what a blog was at the time. The Project involved all the passions I have about writing and cooking. In retrospect, it was very flukey that it got all this attention. The blog was a freeing media and was able to put it out there, and people read it, and there is a lot of back and forth and community that I found very inspiring. It really focused the writing energy.

We are French, we did not grow up with Julia Child on TV or her books. Who is she?

Julia is this icon that everyone knows, everyone knows something about her, her voice and her presence. I never watched her show until I was doing the Project, but I had the book that I loved. When I started doing the Project, I started to get reactions from readers about her. Julia inspires me because she did not take her cooking class until she was 37 years old. If you know Julia Child, she is so huge and she could not do anything else. You cannot picture her not cooking. Before she started to cook, she did not care about eating. She only learned about cooking late from her husband. By the age of 37, she's thinking "I don’t have anything I love to do, I’m married, I love my husband, but there is nothing here that really grabs me. " And when she found cooking, it happened. She became herself. This is what I find inspiring. This late discovery in life of what you are about.

There is also something about the way she is, her presence, which does provoke in people very personal reactions. It is kind of the same way people react to my blog and feel like they know me. She is able to put her personality on paper very well. Her book is very formal book, but it exudes her particular personality. People identify with her at a very personal level and think "she’s my friend…". I encounter people who have their lives changed by a cookbook writer.

How did you start noticing you had an audience on your blog?

I started to get an audience, and I guess it was a viral thing. My blog was on Salon. The blog world was so much smaller then! There was a list of about 50 blogs on Salon, and I was one of them, so people would just click on it. My friends were passing it around to their friends, and it grew that way. The daily hits at the culmination of the project was about 100,000 hits! I like to think of it as 10,000 people reading 10 pages each. The expectation of the readers is why I finished the project. It was a lot of pressure. The NY Times helped a lot too: before the interview with Amanda Hesser, I had 8,000, 10,000 hits a day.

How did you react to the audience?

Readers started to develop a very personal connection. It was strange, because it is very asymmetrical. It was very one-sided. They knew everything about me, they know what I cooked, they knew whether I had a hangover. They were very intimate with me, but I knew nothing about them. It's a very strange relationship. But by and large, the readers were very generous and supportive. I would get stuff in the mail, gifts and such, and it was okay, but…[shudders at how lucky she was not to have stalking readers…]

Do you miss the immediate feedback of the blog commenters' community?

The nice thing about blogging during the Project was, not only there are the cheerleaders who pushed me, but I would also reply to comments, and there was all this chatter all around. Readers would comment between themselves. The Project, and the book, was really a community effort. Aside from the fact that I would have never finished, I don’t know if I would understand the resonance of what I was doing without the commenters. I realized there was something universal to what I was doing. I was in this place were you feel trapped and don’t have good options and have to invent an exit out of it. This was something they associated with very strongly. The attraction of the Project is not the cooking and the butter and the cream, but it is the journey and the self-reinvention.

Why write extensively new material, instead of editing the blog material?

I knew from the end of the Project that I did not want the book to be a re-hash of the blog. What is interesting to read in the morning for 5 iminutes is excrutiating in a book form. I needed a narrative. I had to get rid of the excess blogginess of it. Also, for the blog readers, I wanted a different experience for them. I did not want them to buy the book to find the same old material. I hope that the book is the back side of the blog. There is a play Noises Off which takes place in a theater troupe, and shows their performance in the first act, and backstage in the second act. I wanted the same relationship between the book and the blog.

Why didn't you publish the book with Julia Child’s editor, Knopf?

Actually, publishers came to me. I was getting these press mentions about the Project. About 6 months into it, Knopf called, and talked with me. A publicist there was looking for a project for herself. She brought me in and met with Sonny Mehta, a real high fallutin' guy, on the cover of Vanity Fair, and I’m like "oh shit, I don’t know what to do." So I email the only person I could think of who could advise me, a writer for GQ, whom I met after writing a fan letter to her about her piece about high tech sex dolls. It was the first fan letter she got and we had drinks and she read my stuff, and she was wonderfully kind to me as a frustrated writer. So I send her an email, saying I was in this meeting with Mehta and she replied: "I cannot talk, I’m in Afghanistan, but meet my agent" and I called the agent, and she took care of me.

Julia Child found her calling in Paris, studying at the Cordon Bleu. Would you go there?

No, I don’t think so. I took a cooking class once. But I want to keep cooking a vocation, I don’t want to make it my job. It’s mine, not something I want to get paid for.

There is only one mention of San Francisco in the book, and it is about Good Vibrations? Is that how you think of us?

It was just one of my most memorable experience when I was here. It’s personal. Good Vibes was my first experience of the kind. I went there, and I'm like "woah…all these nice people talking about the different vibrators." It made quite an impression on me. Not enough to equate the city with sex toys, but quite an impression…

What’s next? Are there other books which inspire you?

There are other cookbooks that I can find intriguing but I could not commit myself to do the same thing. In terms of other projects, I think my publisher would like me to write another book about me making myself miserable about food. But the Project is a fluke. It is better than Xeroxing, but I don’t consider myself a "food writer." But books, writing books, that’s the plan.

A lot of real food people get so wound up in the food aspect that it is not only about the food, it’s about the journey.

Your book makes MtAoFC look very sensual, but it looks like the Project made a dent in your own sexuality. Isn't it contradictory?

It is one of these terribly irony. The cooking experience is so sensual, and the way Julia describes it, or the way she wants you to exert yourself, there is no denying there is a real underlying eroticism. And the irony is that the wondeful meal that ought to be an introductory to a romantic moment, you spend so much time and energy preparing it, and then you pass out so tired right away. It was not my best year for my sex life. At least cooking was more physically engaging than working in a cubicle.

There is no engagement with their own body for so many people, and you really need this yen to involve your body in your life and make your back hurt and get you physically into it. As exhausting as it was, it was so helpful. There is a lot of similarity about sex and food, that when you are very involved in either, there is no room in your head, you are just involved in the moment.

You looked to MtAoFC for guidance, you write JC for Julia Child, is MtAoFC your bible?

Kinda. I come from hardcore atheist stock, and I don’t have much feeling for spirituality and organized religion. But I did find something spiritual in that book. It is a guide to life, an instruction manual. The ethos is different.

Cookbooks nowadays are so rarefied, and have such pornographic aspects. “You’re not going to cook, you’re just gonna read and pretend.” On the other hand, there are easy books, "cook this and that in 30 min." Julia is neither. She is not saying French cooking is easy, she's saying "it’s worthwile, and as a person of mettle, you can do it." It’s worth the commitment and the heartache and the setback. There was a great optimism to that. The shorthand that I use and the way that I describe her, you can hear say these words. She was there, in my head. That was pretty intense.

What would you say to the other bloggers who would like to jump to a book deal?

[she laughs…] I don’t think of myself as some instigator of some new movement. There was a new trend a couple years ago, and publishers were willing to sign bloggers to contracts. It might go in the other direction now, the trend might reverse. What is great is the unedited nature of blogging. For me blogging was like having a personal trainer, there were people out there reading it and it made me exercise. You should use that aspect of the media to its fullest. Also, the only difference, as a writer, is that you have proof of marketability before, and that you can do it yourself. You can go to a publisher and show that you have a year of material, and an audience. But what people need is to get a real specific idea of what they are about. Nobody wants to read daily rants. Focus is the trick, as it is easy to get off on tangent.

Julie Powell will be reading from her book at Santa Rosa Jr. College at noon tomorrow and at Book Passage in Corte Madera tomorrow at 7 p.m.