Having survived a typically hectic October (ghost tour season!) with no escapes on the books since July, I found myself in desperate need of a jaunt out of town. Once struck by the idea it wouldn’t let me go, and so I booked a perfect little room for one last-minute night in Newburyport. I can certainly recommend to you the charms of the Essex Street Inn (not the most inspiring of breakfasts, but definitely deliciously cozy, relaxing, and centrally located!), but the real purpose of my mentioning this little excursion today is, of course, the bookstore.
Fabulously well rested on Sunday morning (isn’t that extra hour at the beginning of November just wonderful?), my traveling companion and I found our way to the Jabberwocky Bookshop. I can also highly recommend this stop. A truly excellent independent bookstore with lots of high shelves in which you can easily get lost, reading chairs, and plenty of small step stools for reaching those higher shelves (though it also helps to shop with someone who is tall with long arms!). They have a lovely shelf up front displaying lightly injured and deeply discounted new books (which is a brilliant idea I think all bookstores should adopt immediately), and they shelve their older discounted books right alongside the regularly priced ones! So you can be browsing along and come across the perfect book made even nicer by a bright sticker on the side advertising it at $5.95 instead of $20.00. Really excellent. Unfortunately for me, I did find a book I really wanted that lacked that nifty price tag, and since I had already purchased one full-priced book that morning, and had a couple of discounted ones in my stack, I made a note of the title for later, and left The French Chef in America: Julia Child’s Second Act, on the shelf.
Upon returning home, I began each of my other new purchases, and another book I had meant to read last year, and couldn’t quite get into any of them. So I took myself to Amazon, and ordered a deeply discounted used copy of The French Chef in America. This purchase did not come with Prime shipping, but it did come with a ‘start reading now!’ sample of the book for my Kindle. I don’t have the very best relationship with my Kindle (for obvious reasons), but I downloaded the sample and started reading. And got to the end of the sample and sat in existential angst for maybe five minutes before buying the full Kindle edition. I should’ve just paid full price for the book in Newburyport…
I do believe that books come into our lives like people; we’ll invest in them when we’re ready for them, and often they show up just when they are most needed. But since this is now the fifth book in my library about Julia Child, it bears the question, why Julia?
If you read my Why Winston post a few weeks ago, I did touch on the answer to this question there, but, as with Winston, there is more to my fascination with Julia than just the quality of her relationship with Paul.
I first came to Julia through the 2009 movie Julie and Julia. I adore Meryl Streep. I saw the movie when it came out and adored it too. I bought it when it came available on dvd and so had it on hand in 2010. 2010 was a very hard year for me start to finish. One of my saving graces that year was my dear roommate who believed very firmly in cinema therapy. I don’t remember if we watched Julie and Julia together or if I just put it on for myself, but there was something about it that cheered me up, and I can’t tell you how many times I played that dvd over the course of that year. To this day, if I find myself in a funk, that movie can inevitably turn it around. My love of the movie naturally lead me to read My Life in France, which I also adored, and that was the extent of my interest until I came to Boston in 2012.
. Julia’s kitchen was also removed from this home and reassembled in the Smithsonian National Museum of American History in Washington DC.Thanks to the movie and the book, I knew that Julia and Paul had moved to Cambridge when they returned from abroad in 1961. So when I took my first, fated tour with Cambridge Historical Tours, at the end of the tour I asked for directions to Julia’s house. Sweet Georgia sent me in the wrong direction, and since I had the migraine monster niggling behind my eyes, my mom and I gave up the search and went back to the apartment for a nap. I did finally find Julia’s house a couple of years later when I moved to Winter Hill and my walk to work took me right down Irving Street. 103 Irving is now purple with solar panels on the roof. Not exactly as I pictured Julia and Paul’s home, but it is still there, a couple of doors down from the homes of William James and ee cummings. Also still around is Savenor’s Market, a favorite of Julia’s while they lived in Cambridge. I have been a more frequent visitor to Savenor’s Boston location as I used to work right down Charles Street and it was such a delightful place to get my groceries on my way to the T and home.
So movie and proximity aside, what is it about Julia? The most obvious association with Julia Child is, of course, food and cooking. Having grown up an only child in a quiet house, accustomed to taking my meals mostly alone with my books and my homework (rehearsals wait for no midterm!), I fondly associate cooking and communal meals with holidays.
There were the summers I spent building castles on my grandmother’s yellow-tiled kitchen floor as she cooked around me. College weekends in the same kitchen, baking cookies with my grandfather (me baking, he keeping me company and waiting impatiently for the oven to do its job). December evenings spent with my mother covering ourselves in powdered sugar as we baked Christmas cookies and sang along to Harry Connick Jr. The weekly brownie-bake with my college roommate. Tamales and Wassail around the Christmas tree. And, perhaps most especially, the king of all, Thanksgiving.
When I was growing up, we usually went to my aunt’s house in Terrell, TX. Each year, for several days, their tiny kitchen was full of a hodgepodge of family all cooking together, eating together and playing board games on the spare surfaces. The days revolved around the cooking and eating of our meals and lots and lots of laughter. Thinking back on that now, it occurs to me that those memories are probably why I like an ‘open-concept’ kitchen, that blends easily into the living room and whatever happens to be going on there. Cooking was communal. It was fun, it was family. And even though I have never boasted any great skill in the kitchen (except for my world-famous pumpkin cookies!), I have had the great good fortune this year to remember how joyful an experience it is to cook with and for other people. Fun, joy, community, and food were all things in which Julia wholeheartedly believed.
But I think my main draw to Julia, at least at the beginning, was twofold and had not much to do with cooking. First was the simple fact that she did what she did on her own. And by that I don’t mean alone. She certainly had many teachers, collaborators, and supporters on her way, but she carved her own path. Julia was never one to go by the book. She blazed her own trail right into the OSS during the War, and from there to France and a professional cooking school where no self-respecting, upper middle class housewife in her right mind would dare to tread in the 1950s. But Julia was passionate, and she followed that passion into a truly memorable, and enormously successful career. She didn’t climb anyone’s ladder. She ruffled more than a few feathers. But she did it anyway, she did it her way, and she did it well.
She also did it older. In 2010, I was 23, one year out of college and feeling utterly directionless and untethered. I had always been an excellent student, but I had mixed feelings about graduate school and absolutely no idea how to handle life outside of academia. In the midst of all that angst, there was something oh, so comforting in Julie and Julia when Julie finds her calling at 30. And something even more comforting in Julia Child’s having found Paul and France and cooking in her 30s. I was not behind, there was still hope somewhere out there at the end of my 20s. If Julia could change the world after 30, well then, so could I!
Perhaps with that inspiration in mind, I think I did manage to pull myself together. I collected some truly marvelous experience in my 20s, always carrying with me that whimsical hope of the ‘magical 30th year,’ and I stormed into 2017 sure in the knowledge that great things were coming with my 30th birthday. And oh what a year it has been! Expectation and intention I’m sure have played a part, but there is certainly something about 30 that has felt more than a little magical. But that’s a musing for another day.
In the meantime, I’m going to head to the store and buy a lot of butter, and some powdered sugar and flour and marshmallow fluff, in the glorious expectation of some Christmas cookie baking with my mom.
Bon Appetit!
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I Digress 