Back when Julie Powell’s Julia Child project was a moderate big-deal blog, long ago, I did stop in and look at it. It was one of those blogs that looked interesting, but didn’t look entertaining enough to get bookmarked; there are more interesting blogs than I want to read.
When the book Julie & Julia came out, though, my Best Reader (who hadn’t ever seen the blog) was intrigued, so when I saw it at the library, I picked it up for her, and of course read it myself. And it was ... just about as entertaining as the blog appeared to be. That is, good enough to read, but not necessarily good enough to choose to read over something else that is also good enough to read. You know? My main complaint, oddly enough, is that I didn’t much like the Julie character (who is the writer, but is (like YHB) a construct of the writer, and thus one could like the character Julie but not Julie Powell or vice versa). She was enough like me that the differences were annoying, rather than exotic. And, I’m afraid, the differences she emphasized were the ones more or less designed to piss me off, as they are the choices that I eschewed to get my own life. Even with all the talk about the biological clock, Julie is very very childless; she drinks and stays up late and socializes with other childless people and eats dinner at eleven at night. Something about all of that just gets up YHB’s nose. Not that people shouldn’t do all of that, but rather than thinking I’d like to hang out with her I was thinking she wouldn’t hang out with us.
What makes all of this particularly interesting is that the end of the book is particularly moving, and it addresses this issue of the writer/character and our sense of kinship or lack thereof. After all, Ms. Powell wrestles through most of the book with Julia Child, with her construct of Ms. Child based on Ms. Child’s construct of herself in Mastering the Art of French Cooking and her television shows. And it’s pretty clear that Julia Child also wouldn’t much care for Julie. I mean, who knows, if they actually met, but even if Julia Child was a blog reader during that year, I don’t think she would have got much enjoyment out of the thing. And when, between the blog and the book, Julia Child died, Ms. Powell writes about, well, I wish I had the book here to quote from, but she essentially talks about the Julia in her head, and how that Julia does like her, but more important, how that Julia helps her, makes her a better person. Julie Powell is a better Julie Powell because of the Julia Child in her head, and that Julia Child in her head is a creation of Julia Child. And that’s a wonderful thing. In contrast, there’s an old elementary school teacher in her head that dislikes her and is generally awful. Although the legacy of the television chef and the school teacher is in some sense a construct of Julia Powell, it’s also in some sense a construct of the actual people.
Myself, I have, oh, a few of those. Walt Whitman is one. My mother is another. There’s another who is a Gentle Reader of this very blog. I describe the world to myself by (in my head) describing it to them, and that includes, sometimes at least, defending the choices I make as I am making them, which means that I make the choices that I think I can defend to them. Not always (and not always the right choices, come to that), but they are to some extent compasses to guide by. And it’s complicated—take, for instance, my Best Reader. She also has a construct in my consciousness; I also attempt to live the life I could defend to her. The difference is that I almost always do defend (or, to use a somewhat less loaded word, explain, or in some cases simply demonstrate) my actions to her; the conversations in my head are preparations for the actual conversations that take place. With my mother, on the other hand, most of the conversations never actually do happen (thank the Lord). And they don’t happen at all with Mr. Whitman.
And then, you see, there is my own construct of Vardibidian. I don’t converse with Vardibidian in my head (not that it would be bad or deranged to do so, but I don’t), but I do find that I am mentally verbalizing my life either as Vardibidian or, you know, not. I am aware of V. as a construct of my own; as opposed to, say, my self, which of course, um, anyway.
It’s a reasonably good book, that’s what I’m saying, although I didn’t enjoy it as much as I hoped to.
chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.