Food author Julie Powell, who turned an web darling after running a blog for a yr about making each recipe in Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, resulting in a guide deal and a movie adaptation, has died. She was 49.
Powell died of cardiac arrest Oct. 26 at her house in upstate New York, The New York Times reported. Her dying was confirmed by Judy Clain, Powell’s electronic mail and editor in chief of Little, Brown.
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“She was a brilliant writer and a daring, original person and she will not be forgotten,” Clain stated in an announcement. “We are sending our deepest condolences to all who knew and loved Julie, whether personally or through the deep connections she forged with readers of her memoirs.”
Powell’s 2005 guide Julie & Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen turned the hit, Nora Ephron-directed movie Julie & Julia, with the creator portrayed within the film by Amy Adams and Meryl Streep as Child.
Her sophomore and final effort — titled Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat and Obsession — was a bit jarring in its honesty. Powell revealed she had an affair, the ache of loving two males without delay, of her fondness for sadomasochism and even a bout of self-punishing intercourse with a stranger.
“People coming from the movie Julie & Julia and picking up Cleaving are going to be in for some emotional whiplash,” she instructed The Associated Press in 2009. “I don’t believe it’s going to be a Nora Ephron movie.”
Powell started her affair in 2004 as she was placing the ending touches on her first guide, a time she writes when she was “starry-eyed and vaguely discontented and had too much time on my hands.”
By 2006, she had landed an apprenticeship at a butcher store two hours north of New York City, which supplied an escape from her crumbling marriage and a spot to discover her childhood curiosity with butchers.
“The way they held a knife in their hand was like an extension of themselves,” she stated. “I’m a very clumsy person. I don’t play sports. That kind of physical skill is really foreign to me, and I’m really envious of that.”
The guide explores the hyperlink between butchering and her personal tortured romantic life. At one level, whereas chopping the connective tissue on a pig’s leg, she writes: “It’s sad, but a relief as well, to know that two things so closely bound together can separate with so little violence, leaving smooth surfaces instead of bloody shreds.”
Her guide tapped into the rising curiosity in old skool butchery and her expertise slicing meat truly resulted in her consuming much less of it. She was an advocate for humanely raised and slaughtered animals.
“People want to get their hands dirty. People want to participate in the process. People want to know where their food is coming from,” Powell stated. “People don’t want the mystery anymore.”
She is survived by her husband, Eric.
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