Don’t be mistaken – Julie Powell doesn’t write about cooking. She writes about obsession. She owns obsession.
In Cleaving, Powell sorts through the aftermath of an affair, unable to stop a consuming, emotionally damaging passion; yet she is also unable to fathom separation from her husband, a man who loves her limitlessly and whose life has been intertwined with hers since she was 18 years old.
Powell attacks her emotional turmoil with a raw, brutal honesty that is rarely captured in print. Her candor reminds me of the intimate conversations I’ve had with my closest girlfriends when suffering through heartbreak that we just can’t hide: the kind of heartbreak that leaves you unable to pretend to be strong or brave or even moral. Perhaps this is something that my friends and I have in common with her as New Yorkers – it’s not uncommon to see women unabashedly weeping on the subway – and I’m not sure if love here is just more dramatic or we’re all just used to public emotion. Regardless, Powell suffers NYC-style: openly, dramatically, obsessively.
This is what makes Cleaving so compelling. She barely talks about Julie & Julia, cooking, or her success at all. She manages to keep her voice brutally honest even after the success of her first book, only slightly aware that there will be an audience. (Or maybe she is aware, but is so obsessed with her lover that she just doesn’t care.) Even her new project, learning to be a butcher, is really just a distraction for her emotional turmoil, something to keep her from constantly checking her Blackberry for texts that never come.
Honestly, this isn’t the best book I’ve ever read: it’s not the most focused, the most beautiful, or even as good as Julie & Julia. But it is a one-woman love story, and for anyone who has been there, it’s impossible to turn away.
