Twirlit Book Review: “Cleaving” by “Julie and Julia” Author

In Cleaving, author Julie Powell tackles the memoir genre again with her recounting of life after the success of Julie & Julia. It seems that in the ensuing years, her marriage has hit the skids–thanks mostly to an affair on her part–and heads to the boonies to immerse herself in the world of butchery, possibly to get her head straight, but possibly just to run away from things.

I was pretty excited to read this book. I liked Julie & Julia, and even if the subject matter appeared a bit controversial for an America’s sweetheart/every-woman type memoirist, I wanted to see it. My optimism clearly got the better of me because nearly from the get-go Cleaving made me absolutely furious.

Like many people, when I saw the movie adaptation of Julie & Julia, I thought Meryl Streep as Julia was amazing and the Julie parts were just eh. After some thought I decided this was because Julie Powell, as a person, is kind of a whiny, Gloomy Gus, Debby Downer type. It’s a little more subtle in the book than the movie, but it’s there.

Then you read Cleaving and it is just everywhere. The obsession with butchery is sleep-inducingly boring (Oh, can you go on for pages about how to break down the boring muscle of the I don’t care animal? Great. Thanks.), and how she treats her husband is appalling. Not only does she cheat on him, he found out and didn’t leave her. And she kept doing it–for a long, long time.

Now, I know there are gray areas. I know I don’t know either of them personally and he could be an annoying drip. But how she portrays things is that she’s the jerk and he was a nice guy–who basically just stood by withstanding an unbelievable ration of shit–and as a woman married to a really nice man, and friends with other really nice men, this makes me lose my mind. I know it’s her husband’s business to decide whether or not he will stand up for himself, but it still makes it hard to read.

Not to mention the fact that the guy she cheated with smartened up and left her, so she spends the bulk of the time talking about him pining in a way that is really uncomfortably pathetic/psycho/self-indulgent. She describes letter after letter that she kept writing to him, months after he stopped responding, in which she would say quite jarring sexual things to him that–lets just say don’t make sense in light of the rest of her writing style. And don’t get me started on how I feel about the fact that the husband will have to read this now, adding an impossible level of insult to the already heinous injury.

In short (ha), she makes herself into the most unsympathetic of narrators. In some ways, one could argue this is ballsy–Powell has to know that the memoir isn’t painting a very flattering portrait of herself. It could be construed as brave that she is owning these unflattering feelings and unflattering actions. But I don’t think she’s doing it for that reason. Mostly because she spends the bulk of the book yammering in aforementioned boring detail about the butchery and very little (albeit a potent little) about the affair/marriage issues. That she escaped into the world of butchery to escape this mess her personal life I get, but the narrative connection between these two things is thin–to say the least.

About two-thirds of the way through the book, Powell started to travel (mostly because she still couldn’t bear to be home and face her marriage). At that point, the book actually got interesting because she actually started to grow. Travel changes you. Shocker.

But still, a couple of bad things happened to her and I actually found myself feeling some empathy for her, which was new. But although it softened my feelings for her somewhat, it didn’t do so to the extent that I could recommend this book. Mostly I recommend that her husband would wise up and get the funk out. And find another woman who appreciated him instead of treated him so foul-y. And that Julie Powell used some of her book money for some seriously needed therapy.