I’ve been on the road for a few days now—I’m in San Francisco now, kickin’ it old school with a Jack Daniels bottle from the mini-bar before heading out to my reading tonight at Books, Inc. at the Marina—and have done quite a few interviews and fielded enough questions to be able pick out my top five or so that I’m asked most often. Right up there at the top of the list, just under "How surreal is it to see yourself portrayed in a movie?" (Answer, for the last time: very) but perhaps a bit above "What’s your favorite cut of meat?" (Answer: I like ‘em all, but oxtails rule) is: "The Julie of Cleaving is completely different from the Julie of Julie & Julia—how do you expect readers to react?"

It’s a loaded question, of course, a quasi-polite way of asking, "So how the hell am I supposed to follow you from sweet Julia Child-devotion and marital bliss to beef-hacking adultery, you slut, you?" It’s question meant, a bit, to trip me up. Like how, in the big police procedurals, the idea is to just ask the same question in different forms until the perp slips up. "Ah, so you ARE in fact a skank, is that what you’re saying now?"

I’m not going to slip, though. Just where would I slip to, after all? That’s the nice thing about laying it all out there, bloody as an open wound. When someone calls me an amoral, filthy, self-absorbed whore, there’s no pain there, because hey, I got there first. I reported that as breaking news.

One thing, however, always flummoxes me about this question. This thing about the two Julies. Glinda the Good Julie, the Wicked Julie of the West. That is hard for me to wrap my mind around. I mean, it’s just me. Okay, that’s an obvious point to make; it’s not as if anyone is suggesting there’s an actual evil twin scenario going on here. But I have, you know, lived my life, and I can attest, I just have the one. The marriage connects to the blog connects to the book connects to the affair connects to the butchery ... all of which connect to high school theater and my first car (a ’69 Buick Le Sabre, as it happens) and, I don’t know, my relationship with my mother. I don’t see the disconnect between the parts that are nice and full of butter and Julia Child and the parts that are painful and include pig parts and BDSM. One leads to the other and back again. It’s hard for me to remember, sometimes, that for people who know me through the experience of reading my books or, even more discombobulating, watching Amy Adams play me in a romantic comedy and then reading my second book, I must really seem like a fiction, a character in a novel. And the problem with characters in novels is that they have more responsibility than ordinary messy actual people do to make sense. Actors need to figure out their characters’ motivations in order to move forward with the role; people don’t need to figure out their own to do the same. (Strictly speaking. Though a little psychoanalysis can come in handy from time to time, I’m here to tell you.)

When you’re looking at a character in a novel, it’s easy, maybe even necessary, to define her role in the scheme of things. Is she the protagonist, the comic foil, the villain of the piece? Of course, in our own lives we perform all those roles, and we don’t really think of ourselves as "good" or "bad." We’re just "me." A maker of bad choices? Sure. Fucked up? Oh, yes. An amoral, filthy, self-absorbed whore? Sometimes, absolutely. Still, somehow, good vs. evil seems a bit beside the point, to me. But of course not to readers. A reader’s job is to judge these things. It just that that judgment takes some getting used to, when you’re the character under scrutiny.

When J & J: The Movie! was coming out, Amy Adams did a big interview for one of the women’s magazines—Allure, I think it was. At the end of the interview the reporter—in sort of a dick move, I thought—suddenly sprung upon her the information that the woman her character in J & J was based on had a new book coming out, in which she recounts having an extramarital affair. Amy was clearly thrown off by this information and replied, "My Julie Powell would never do that."

"My Julie Powell." I found that fascinating and sort of adorable, actually. That Amy Adams had internalized some version of me, had invested in the person she thought I was, had created a character out of me, not only on screen, which was her job, but in her head and heart, which is what makes her so good at her job, was odd, but also oddly flattering. "Her" Julie Powell isn’t me, but I’m glad she has one and is so clear on what she would or wouldn’t do. Lord knows, I wish I were so clear.

I hope Amy’s Julie is generous enough to forgive the much more fallible, less cute, and entirely more confused and confusing Julie that she’s based on.

Still of Amy Adams © 2009 Sony Pictures Digital Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Tags: amy adams, cleaving: a story of marriage, julie & julia, julie powell, meat and obsession

In this video, the author of Cleaving shows us how to butcher a leg of lamb...and a relationship.

Tags: butchery, cleaving, julie & julia, julie powell, videos

The Cleaving reviews are rolling in now—I imagine they’ve in fact peaked and will begin to fall off here in a bit. There have been some raves, and some respectful mixed pieces. And then there have been the pans. Which is where it all gets … interesting.

Reading bad reviews of your own work—and I assure you there have been more than a couple in my case—is not the most fun way ever to spend one’s time. I tend to do it by staring at my laptop with my fingers in a lattice across my face, horror-movie style, as if psychic blows could be evaded by squealing and squeezing my eyes shut. But I knew what I was getting myself into with this (well, sort of), and I’m a big girl. I can handle it. Besides, bad reviews can be enlightening, and not just because I’m a welcoming sea-sponge for constructive criticism. Somehow, it seems to me, there’s something particularly eye-opening about the pans for Cleaving, some way in which writing about the book seems to reveal as much or more about the reviewer as about the book being reviewed.

Take, for instance, Peter Gianotti’s piece for Newsday. Never could I have imagined when Julie & Julia was released back in 2005 that such a viciously negative review would make me giggle rather than cringe. In an oddly personal attack that opens with the condescension that most male critics seem to consider de rigueur when discussing “chick-lit” writers and then moves into a tone of righteous ire, Mr. Gianotti uses words such as “unhinged” to describe me, and is equally put off by the depictions of butchery (“an offal experience”) and those of sex, “rough and otherwise.” Peter clearly has very little regard for my prose, and that, of course, is the sort of thing it is the reviewer’s job to point out. (Though I would perhaps quibble with the literary taste of anyone who throws the “awful/offal” pun around as painfully as he does.) But he also seems to have taken violent offense at me. Which pleases me immensely, I was surprised to discover. Who knew? I wound up posting the review on my Facebook page as one of my favorites. I found that, as a writer, I was thrilled that I’d hit a nerve, and I called that one a win.

Several friends, snarkier than I, made some emasculating remarks about what in Mr. Gianotti’s past had caused this particular book about meat and adultery to get him so riled up. I’ll not speculate as to that, myself. But it is interesting to contemplate, in going over these reviews, what exactly it is that rubs some people the wrong way. There are a few different things, I think, and in the next few days I’ll try to address several of them, but I think a major issue is the TMI Problem. Apparently, I have tendency to overshare. Which seems to me, at first glance, a rather odd thing to be rubbed wrong by when reading a memoir. I mean, do you want to read a memoir by a person who undershares? I’ve been a professional oversharer for seven years now, so the label’s not news to me. I guess what is news is how surprising it is to everyone else.

Some have seemed to get enraged by my penchant for giving too much information; in others, I seem to awake a sort of passive-aggressive maternalism. One of the most hilarious examples of this perspective came from Addie Broyles of my hometown paper, the Austin-American Statesman. I’m on good terms with Ms. Broyles, or at least I was the last time I checked. But it’s fair to say she’s not a huge fan of the TMI either. “There's something to be said about modesty when it comes to writing about extramarital sex, the painful details of which I'm too embarrassed for her to share, just in case her family or friends are reading this.” Now, in full disclosure, Addie has met my mother, and so I can understand her worry that any incendiary information might, printed in this local newspaper, fall into sensitive hands. What I really love, though, is the phrase, “I’m too embarrassed for her … .” As if I had toilet paper stuck to my shoe or spinach in my teeth; as if, in other words, I wasn’t actually aware I’d written a book that contains explicit sex and other personal revelations. As if I needed to be protected from that information.

Now, of course I understand that we say this all the time. “I was embarrassed for her; she was acting like such a jack-ass.” But how can we be embarrassed for someone who isn’t herself embarrassed by her actions? I can empathize with someone who is keenly feeling humiliation. But if a woman, say, blithely walks down a red carpet in a dress shaped like a swan—to choose an example that betrays my age—any discomfort I might feel is not something I’m feeling on her behalf. It’s something her appearance is eliciting in me. Something about me.

Which brings me to a third response to TMI, one that writers and bloggers who use their personal lives as subject matter will recognize as more flattering, but also occasionally more unnerving: overidentification.

I’ve by now spoken to quite a few people about their reactions to Cleaving, in both a professional and a personal capacity. And among a small minority of them I have noticed a certain energy cropping up, a … vibe, I guess you’d call it. Mostly, though not entirely, it’s been men I’ve gotten this vibe from, for whatever reason—with Julie & Julia, it tended to come from women. None of these people have been crazy; the conversations have all been above-board and beyond reproach. But there creeps in an intensity of focus, a buzz of empathy, one might say intimacy. Aroused by what they’ve read about in my book. About what I’ve “confessed.” Though confession implies a singular event—a priest, a screen, a booth, a whisper. Not a book being distributed around the country. And it makes me wonder. What if the next person who identifies is actually crazy? This is where stalkers are born. And I’ll have brought it on myself. I have shared too much information, perhaps. Not everything I write, even what I write about me, has to have as its goal to crack myself open like a lobster and expose my quivering insides. I can observe, report, keep a distance. Protect myself from unwanted intimacy, and others from being forced to deeply into my experience. Like so:

I’m propped up in bed in my room at the Savoy Hotel in Tulsa. In the room there is a dishwasher (though no dishes), a painting of a Gibson girl with a pair of salukis, a Parcheesi game, and a VHS tape of the original Little Shop of Horrors. There is no mini-bar, nor a liquor store within a couple of miles—I’ve checked. The pillows are goose down and the quills of the feathers stick out and poke into me. I’m drinking some Folger’s coffee, and am feeling a bit off because I got my period for the first time in three months while I was on the plane from Houston and it’s like I’m having some kind of internal hemorrhage—oops. That one got away from me …

TMI Girl strikes again.

Photograph of couple in bed by Medioimages/Photodisc/Getty Images. Drawing of butcher knives courtesy of Julie Powell.

Tags: cleaved, julie powell, TMI

Hi, everybody. Julie Powell here. I’m out on tour right now for my second book, Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat, and Obsession. Knives, meat and adultery, oh my. Anyway, DoubleX has asked me to keep you apprised of how things go on the road—there are sure to be some interesting times ahead.

To get started, the lovely and talented Hanna Rosin here at DoubleX thought a little Q&A might be in order, to introduce the basic conundrum at hand, which is, in a nutshell: Why does a writer of a best-selling, sweet-as-sugar memoir (turned Nora Ephron movie) follow up with a book about hacking up animals and almost wrecking her marriage? And what happens when she does? I think the below will at least set the stage. And then I’m off. Fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy ride ...

Hanna Rosin: What got you interested in butchery in the first place?

Julie Powell: The first proper butcher shop I ever came to know was Ottomanelli’s, on Bleecker Street in the West Village. I was raised in Austin, TX, where all my family’s meat came from supermarkets, wrapped in cellophane, so the notion of a real, Old New York sort of butcher shop seemed exotic and even dangerous, like something out of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn or The Godfather. I’d probably have been too intimidated to even go into one by myself, but then I began a job as a nanny for a writer and his wife, and the wife took me around to all the area stores where she preferred I buy food for their two boys. I fell in love with Ottomanelli’s the first time I walked in. The gleaming white tile and steel, the tang of aging beef, the abundant cases of meat of all kinds, and especially the men behind the counters, jovial yet deadly serious about their work, which they’d been doing for decades upon decades until the craft of cutting up meat seemed as natural to them as breathing. I’ve never been a very capable person, physically—I was always the last person picked for the softball team, the girl who couldn’t make it up the rope in gym class. I envied these guys in their white coats their sureness, both in their bodies and their knowledge. I wanted that.

This book is partially about your experience as a butcher, but also partially about your relationships with your husband Eric and your lover, D. Why did you decide to fit the two into the same book? Is butchering the metaphor, or do you hate food metaphors for life?

Well, I’m wary of food metaphors in general, though it’s certainly true that metaphor lies thick on the ground when it comes to butchery, and is almost unavoidable, even more than I’d imagined when I began. But I think I’d rather think of the butchering apprenticeship in Cleaving as a prism through which I was able to look at my marriage, and myself and who I wanted to be, in a new way. My original working title, when I was writing my proposal, was The Dying Art: A Story of Meat and Marriage. I was obviously in a much rawer and less optimistic place then, because the links I saw between marriage and butcher shops were that: 1) Both were struggling, perhaps indeed dying institutions. 2) A sort of dying, whether actual or spiritual, seemed an inherent facet of both. But as I began to do the work, I realized there was something beautiful about the delicate process of ushering a dead animal into something else that was nourishing and beautiful. That seemed to speak to me, to be telling me something about how to look at my relationships with these men, what they meant, how the pieces of them fit together and could come apart. I’m now glad that I didn’t go with The Dying Art, as appropriate as it seemed to me at the time. For one thing, the craft of artisanal butchery is on the rise; for another, marriage or any other relationship, I’ve found, doesn’t have to be a suffocating box—it’s something that changes and grows and flows on, in one way or another.

Were you nervous about writing such a confessional book?

You know, I don’t think I really let myself think about it too much. I just knew I had to write it. I had to do it for myself, to work through this very dark time, through what was going on in me that led me to make all the choices I did, many of them hurtful and downright dangerous. But I also felt a responsibility to write as truthful account of what had happened to this “perfect marriage” that so many people had invested so much in after Julie & Julia. Not to tear it down or to expose any falsehood or inauthenticity in the first book, but simply to observe what I had learned, that we are all of us, married or not, more complicated and troubled and uncertain than I’d given credence to. In a way it’s in deference to marriage, to see it as the thorny, constantly changing and threatened, resilient thing that it is.

I’ve never much minded exposing myself as a jackass, so that helped.

Your "character" in this book is so much darker than in Julie & Julia. Were you nervous that your readers would react badly?

I knew some readers would react badly. Hell, some people reacted badly to Julie & Julia, and that book is basically a soufflé of a book, albeit one studded with the odd crunchy curse word and a heavy dusting of anti-Republican fairydust. It’s hard for me to see the “character” Julie Powell as so very different in the two books, since of course she’s me in both. Just me at two very different moments in life. Not all folks are going to like what I have to say, and I don’t go out of my way in Cleaving to make myself or my actions particularly likable. Some will identify and some will not, and I get both reactions.

We must ask this, because everyone who reads it will wonder about it—how is your husband reacting?

Eric is naturally treading very carefully in the world right about now. We talked a lot about me writing this book, and I would never have published it without his blessing; couldn’t have, legally, even if I were so callous as to choose to. Eric is a naturally reserved person in the best of times. He’s also an extremely courageous and generous man. He’s not exactly tripping through the daisies this week, but he is understanding enough to know what this book means to me, and what about it is important.

Do you think your marriage is unusual?

I think all marriages are unusual. Unique, in fact.

When you sat down to write, were your feelings about the affair pretty much resolved, or did you exorcise them through the writing?

I was still in a pretty raw place when I began writing, no doubt. To be honest, to this day, I have twinges of pain when I think of those years. But the book got me through, was part of how I found the distance to see the affair for what it was, and what it wasn’t, just as importantly.

Was it awkward to write sex scenes about your own life?

I don’t know that I’ve ever written a sex scene that wasn’t about my own life, in one way or another, so I don’t think I could say, relatively speaking, whether it was more awkward than some so-called “fictional” scenario. But honestly, I didn’t find the writing of it awkward at all. Sometimes having them be read is a little squirm-inducing. People seem to be quite shocked by some of what I portray, but it all seems fairly tame to me, compared to what you read a lot of male authors write about. Though the opening of Chapter Eight is when I always find myself saying, “And THIS is why my mother cannot read this book.”

Has anyone reacted badly to their portrayal in this book?

Shockingly, not really. Eric has only skimmed the book, though he knows the content. D. read it and signed a consent form; that was all very civil. Everybody at Fleisher’s [where I apprenticed] is happy, I think. The only person I could think of who’d get upset is my mother, but then, as I said, she’s solved that problem by refusing to read the book.

Why did you decide to travel? What did you learn?

I think of my apprenticeship at Fleisher’s as an incubation period, and my travels as my first experimental flights upon emerging. Eric and I have been together since we were 18 years old, and one of the upshots of that fact is that I’d never truly been to a foreign country on my own. I’d never challenged myself to navigate in truly unfamiliar surroundings and had never had the opportunity to see and interpret a place with my own two eyes without looking through the lens of Eric’s perspective. I did want to meet people from around the world who knew butchery and meat, but I also just wanted to meet people from around the world and introduce myself to them as a woman on her own, taking care of herself (more or less.)

Are you still butchering? Cooking?

I would call myself a hobbyist butcher—I still get up to Fleisher’s whenever I can, but if you’re not doing it every day you do lose the strength and also, to some extent, the muscle-level certainty. I’m hoping that once this tour is done and the holidays are over, I can get to it more regularly. As for cooking, sure. Eric and I cook at home probably at least four nights a week, usually eating leftovers on the other days.

Did you end up feeling that butchering is a man's world to some extent? Is the girl butcher the next girl rocker?

Butchery is definitely a man’s world—it’s part of what attracted me to it. I’ve always aspired to being one of the guys, to shed my femininity for a while and be valued for, say, my ability to wield a knife or tell a dirty joke. I will say, though, that it’s becoming less so as butchery becomes the hot new thing on the culinary map. Which is a silly thing, to a certain extent—the Rock Star Butcher phenom—but it is underlaid by a pretty cool motivation that more and more people are feeling, to become a part of the process that brings their meals from the pasture to their table. It’s definitely a tough girl thing, though, like being in the roller derby or something.

Photograph of Julie Powell by Kelly Campbell.

Tags: cleaving: a story of marriage, julie & julia, julie powell, meat and obsession