In The Flesh

Julie Powell Comes to the Woodstock Writers Festival

by Nina Shengold and photographs by Jennifer May, February 01, 2010

Julie Powell doesn’t mince words. Her second memoir Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat, and Obsession (Little Brown, 2009) is a startling follow-up to the bestselling Julie and Julia, which inspired one of the summer’s most effervescent films, starring Amy Adams as Powell and Meryl Streep as Julia Child.

Julie and Julia started its life as a blog. With her 30th birthday looming, Amherst-educated cubicle worker Powell (“government drone by day, renegade foodie by night”) set out to cook her way through Julia Child’s masterpiece Mastering the Art of French Cooking: 524 recipes in 365 days. The ups and downs of this “deranged assignment,” detailed in her signature breezy, tell-all style, won a huge online following and landed Powell book and movie deals.

Happily ever after, right? Only in the movies.

If Julie and Julia was a frothy soufflé, Cleaving is beefsteak tartare. This tale of carnal and carnivorous yearnings is not for all palates, but if you like your memoirs raw and juicy, it won’t disappoint.

Powell enters a Manhattan coffeeshop with a gust of winter wind. She doesn’t look a thing like Amy Adams. Her hair is dark, her brown eyes sharp and bright. She’s wearing a parka over a nubby brown sweater with a few stray pine needles in the weave, a distinctly nonurban, nonceleb outfit. Her conversation is equally down-to-earth; she can be jaw-droppingly uncensored. Even when gleefully skewering fellow authors with phrases like “sanctimonious prick,” and “smug bitch,” Powell never invokes the dread “off the record.” “I’m a pretty confessional kind of girl,” she says with a grin.

Indeed. “Cleaving” is one of those rare English words with near-opposite meanings; its dictionary definitions include “to stick or adhere, cling or hold fast” and “to split, rend apart.” In Powell’s case, both meanings are equally apt.

The high-pressure Julie/Julia Project sent shock waves through a relationship that began when both partners were still in their teens. By the time Julie and Julia was published, Powell was deep in the throes of an obsessive, sexually kinky affair, and her husband Eric was seeing another woman. “During the book tour, we were separated. And I’d written a book about this wonderful supportive marriage, which was true at the time,” she asserts. “But by the time it came out, things were so much thornier. So there was a certain amount of cover-up. It made me feel like a liar.”