There are times when breathing/eating/sleeping the Iraq war and Middle East politics takes its toll for me, a Marine mom with a son in Iraq, particularly after Dubya’s contemptible plea for a surge of 20,000 U.S. troops in Baghdad.
So, last night I took time off from reading about the formation of al-Qaeda in Lawrence Wright’s "The Looming Tower" to plow through "Julie & Julia," the seriocomic, no-holds-barred memoir of a 30-year-old secretary who cooked and blogged her way through the 524 recipes in Julia Child’s "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" — in one year.
But it wasn’t the clean getaway from politics after all.
While I was unimpressed by her struggles — snob alert: I have a professional chef’s diploma from the Cambridge (Mass.) School of Culinary Arts, which means I entered the seventh ring of aspic hell years before author Julie Powell did — and found certain aspects downright disgusting, like her disdain for kitchen hygiene, I couldn’t help but admire the opportunistic pokes at politicians (one fellow Texan in particular) amid her culinary triumphs and disasters.
In the epilogue, Powell writes about her mixed feelings of sadness following Julia Child’s death, at 91, in 2004 (the two had never met):
Even if I had known her, there is no tragedy in such a peaceful death, after such a long and rich and generous life. It’s the death that all of us wish for — well, either that or finding out you have a terminal brain tumor and going out and assassinating some plutocratic motherfucker who’s systematically destroying America’s democracy brick by brick, before you get shot down in a rain of glory. Or maybe that’s just me.
Like I said, no holds barred.
Still, well done, as they say here in the U.K. It's a lightweight memoir that ends up deserving a badge of courage.
Which is more than will ever be said for the man behind the curtain who cooked up the disastrous war in Iraq in the first place.