Julia Child did not start learning to cook until she was in her mid-thirties. She became a television start in her fifties. As a twenty-one year old who has no direction in life, I find these facts incredibly encouraging. Maybe that's the reason I liked the first half of the book so much more than the second half. I loved reading about her discovery of what she wanted to be doing with her life, and all the work she did to make it happen. Julia Child was incredibly ambitious and incredibly driven. Those are qualities I admire.
The first half of the book also takes place in Paris, and I think I could read about Paris for the rest of my life and never get bored with it. At one point she talks about the proprieter of a cheese shop so brilliant that if you went in to buy some Camembert she would ask you when you were planning on eating it and then choose the wheel of cheese that would be perfect in exactly that amount of time. She would choose differently if you were eating it right away, for lunch, or with supper later that night. Can you imagine? That's amazing.
Once the Child's moved away from Paris they moved to Marseille, then Germany, the Washington, then Norway, and then to Cambridge, Mass. I kind of started to lose interest during all of this moving around. It happened while Julia was working on the first volume of Mastering the Art of French Cooking*, and reading about someone working on a cookbook is not the most fascinating thing in the world, generally speaking. Writing a cookbook sounds like absolute torture to me, especially the way Julia did it, so thorough. I admire her, but it seems like it would have been exceptionally tedious.
Aside from the tedium though, Julia Child pretty much has the greatest life of all time. She spent all of her days cooking and thinking about food, her husband was super cool (obviously, otherwise Stanley Tucci would not have played him in a movie** and she had one of the greatest kitchens I have ever seen.
When I grow up I want to be Julia Child. CASE CLOSED.
Page count: 339
Up next: Farewell, My Lovely by Raymond Chandler
*Buckley just got this book. The French onion soup recipe she made was delicious (although they overflowed a little in the oven which led to a small fire later, when we were trying to make chocolate cake).
**Although the fact that Stanley Tucci just played a rapist/murdering in The Lovely Bones seems to indicate a flaw in my logic here.
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