In 2002, Julie Powell began blogging her attempts to cook her way through Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, later adapting that blog into a book, Julie and Julia, which then became a wildly successful film directed by Nora Ephron. While Powell has received much press for this work, her second memoir, Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat, and Obsession, has been given less attention, even though it is, arguably, the more interesting of the two. The book chronicles Powell’s affair, her separation from her husband, and her attempts to heal herself through an apprenticeship to a family-owned butcher in the Catskills.
In this presentation, I will examine how – in Cleaving – Powell attempts to deconstruct not only her earlier memoir but also what literary critic Jessica Lyn Van Slooten has labeled the genre of the “foodie romance.” This genre, Van Slooten argues, “capitalize[s] on the…romance, chick lit, and foodie memoir trends” and “chronicle[s] the pleasures and complications of relationships and consumption.” Many of these texts (for example, Amanda Hesser’s Cooking for Mr. Latte and Elizabeth Bard’s Lunch in Paris: A Love Story, with Recipes) adopt classic romance tropes, and they often position women and men in traditional gender roles when it comes to the space of the kitchen. Cleaving responds to these texts by detailing the dissolution of a marriage - not the fairytale romance - simultaneous with Powell’s learning the very grisly art of butchering. Powell’s narrative, I argue, responds to Carol J. Adams’ theoretical work, The Sexual Politics of Meat (1990), exploding Adams’ assertion that women have been consistently branded as objects to be consumed. Instead, Powell adopts the tools of the butcher and carves out a new narrative in opposition to the foodie romances that have come before it.
About the presenterCaroline J. Smith
Caroline J. Smith is an associate professor in the University Writing Program at The George Washington University where she teaches first-year writing seminars themed around visual culture. Her research interests include women’s fiction and popular culture productions, and she has been published in such journals as Women’s Studies and College Literature. She is the author of Cosmopolitan Culture and Consumerism in Chick Lit (2007).