My Life in France
by Julia Child with Alex Prud’homme
Knopf, 336 pp., $25.95.
You might think there’s simply nothing more to know about Julia Child, but this charming posthumous memoir would prove you quite wrong. As told to her grandnephew the year before her death at age 91, this is a roughly chronological narrative about Julia’s and Paul Child’s life together in France from 1948 forward.
It’s a fascinating tale of how a directionless young American wife found herself living in a totally foreign milieu, how she plunged in and devoured the culture in great enthusiastic gulps, and how she found and followed her passionate life’s work. We already know how the story ends – Child became American TV’s first cooking star and remains the undisputed first lady of French cooking in the United States – and this tells how it all began.
The book has so much going for it that it’s difficult to decide what works best. Right up there is Child’s inimitable storytelling style: wickedly witty, unafraid to laugh at herself, unwilling to suffer fools gladly, and rife with exuberant expressions of her time (“bushwah,” “wizard,” “egghead,” “yahoo,” “balls”). For decades, Paul Child wrote his twin brother weekly; these letters provided details to supplement Julia’s own lively memories of their French life, their friends, her stint at Cordon Bleu, her arduously exacting work on Mastering the Art of French Cooking.
The liberal inclusion of Paul Child’s brilliant black-and-white photos is a huge bonus, revealing much about postwar France, the expat community, and above all, his young wife. My favorite is a gorgeously composed portrait of a thirtysomething Julia propped against a medieval brick wall, nonchalantly lighting a cigarette. Alongside its other considerable merits, the book is a sweet tribute to an admirable marriage between unabashed hedonists who never lost their taste for adventure or each other.
In a market currently flooded with “food memoirs,” this one stands as tall as Julia herself. Whether you care a fig for cooking, do yourself a favor and read this most interesting biography of the season.
This article appears in May 26 • 2006.
