JULIA CHILD

After enjoying the blog, the book, and finally the movie of Julie & Julia, seeing her kitchen at the Smithsonian, catching a French Chef marathon on PBS and checking the DVDs out of the library, and then happening to learn that she grew up just a few blocks away from my apartment (without knowing it, I’d biked past both her childhood homes and the Montessori school she attended—which remains a Montessori school today—at least once a week for the past five years), I was thoroughly in love with Julia Child and ready to learn a little more about her. The definitive biography is Appetite for Life by Noel Riley Fitch, but it weighs in at 569 pages and I didn’t know if my Julia crush was just a momentary fancy or an abiding devotion, so I decided to start with this slender Penguin Lives volume (by Laura Shapiro, the author of Perfection Salad, which I read a few years ago). It turned out to be a great biography, zipping right along with just the right balance of facts and analysis. It gave a good overview of all the major elements of Child’s life, so it will satisfy anyone who has a casual curiosity about her. But it also added so many intriguing details and quotes (the description of how The French Chef was filmed was full of awesome tidbits, including the fact that Paul was backstage washing dishes the entire time) and raised so many interesting issues (not shying away from her flaws, including an evenhanded look at whether she was homophobic) that it made me decide I still want to read the Fitch biography someday, just because I want more Julia. Highly recommended.

(P.S.: This was the second volume of the Penguin Lives series I’d read, after Jane Smiley’s bio of Dickens a couple of years ago, and I was impressed with both. It kind of makes me want to read the whole series, because I like the way authors are matched up with subjects in surprising yet sensible ways—Carol Shields on Jane Austen, Bobbie Ann Mason on Elvis—and I feel like the books give me just the right amount of information; they’re not as slight as Biography episodes, but they don’t start off, as so many massive tomes do, by detailing the subject’s ancestors for generations back.)