Tuesday, December 01, 2009

Department of Bubble Bursting

Were you one of the many who enjoyed Julie and Julia for its pleasant, romantic narrative of young married life in the big city, embellished by French cooking?

Well, here comes a cold dose of reality, courtesy of authoress Julie Powell.

Her latest book is another memoir: Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat, and Obsession. Per a review in today's WSJ, Powell chronicles in the book her apprenticeship with a butcher and her obsessive, sado-masochistic extramarital affair.

For those of us who enjoyed the movie's sweet portrayal of a wife and husband making their way through the vicissitudes of modern marriage with loyalty and patience, the contents of this new book are a bitter reminder of the realism of most Hollywood movies.

We won't venture a guess as to whether Ms. Powell's literary agent or publisher saw this one coming when they inked the deal for multiple books after the first one. What's left to explore after a book that combines such disparately distasteful themes?

Another fantasy destroyed, though we do appreciate the clever ambiguity of the book's title.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

my bubble burst immediately after I watched the film and then raced home to look up the blog. Let's just say that Julie is not nearly as endearing as Amy Adams was in the film. She was much... "bloggier".