My Life in France (2004)

After watching the hilarious and highly entertaining movie Julie & Julia I knew that I had to get my hands on a copy of My Life in France (upon which part of the movie is based, the other part of the movie is based on a book of the same name). I have to say that prior to watching the movie I had no real interest in reading about Julia Child's life. To me she was just that older lady chef who had a piercing, high-pitched voice. If I would have thought about it at all I'm sure I would have thought that she wasn't a very interesting public figure. I would have been so wrong.

It was a revelation to me learning about what a strong and spirited woman Julia was. Her personal story reveals not only the passion she had for cooking, but her passion for life.

I love reading books about women who have strength of spirit; those who are leaders. At first glance Julia Child might not seem like the ideal candidate for this category, but the story of her strengths, passions, and achievements as told in this book reveal to the reader a woman willing to push through life's roadblocks in order to achieve her goals.

Whether through joining a chef's cooking class rather than the one recommended for housewives, or persevering through years of work on her cookbook while receiving rejections from publishers, or by standing up for what she believed in when it came to her political beliefs (in the face of McCarthyism and the opinions of her conservative father), she showed strength of character and of will.

Julia Child's story of her life in France was like her life itself - filled with joy, passion, and a love of good food. ( )

Child’s book, it should be beyond surprise, reads rather like a cookbook. The reader is dizzied with untranslated French and long lists of French foods and left wondering if the subject was that of snails or gourmet crackers or perhaps the neighbor’s cat. The text is a skillful lesson in gleaning from context quickly which passages should be read in detail and which should be merely glossed over for lack of adding anything to the narrative. No matter how assiduous I might read and reread Julia’s detailed dinner menu from December 5th of 1962, it is exceptionally unlikely that any impression will be left on my apparently impregnable mind.

Actual writing aside, one is left at the end with a vast respect for the life that Child led. Her experiences were varied, her energy and patience immense and yet she never seemed to succumb to the egotism so common in the accomplished. She acknowledged that her chosen topic was a complex one but she pursued it with a vigor and exactitude that made it accessible to the common housewife of the time. Unlike her predecessors she took the time to make sure that the recipes in her book were not only detailed enough to be executed by the uninitiated but also didn’t include those ingredients that couldn’t be obtained outside of France. Her legend as the bridge between French cooking and America seems well earned.

Overall, I’d grant the book a few stars out of five but it would be much more entertaining to someone who had more of a connection either with cooking or with French culture. It is fairly hard to dive mind-first into a book that requires so much of it to be explicitly ignored. ( )

I really enjoyed this book. It's a series of chronological recollections by Julia Child, written in her voice. She was a remarkable, tough, intense, and completely unsentimental person and you get a very clear picture of her in this book.
I found her strength and energy and unwillingness to put up with nonsense of any kind very inspiring! She was a formidable and wonderful person. ( )

Love it...definitely identify with her not finding her place in life at an early age, and I wish I had her, how do you say? Joie de vivre? Only complaint was all of the french foods that I basically skipped over because I didn't understand what they were.

(Pardon my gross attempt at French!) ( )

Interesting memoir. Child was a fascinating person, and one gets the feeling, a prickly and passionate one as well. Nothing is ever stated right out front, but in passing she refers to stomping on letters in anger and that sort of thing. I suspect she was formidable. This book made me terribly hungry, too.

Here's where my provincial and ridiculous prejudices show. The thing I didn't like about listening to this CD was the part where the American-sounding narrator switched into full-on nasal, gargly, obtrusive French at every opportunity. It struck my monolingual ear as affected, and broke up the narration for me. Perhaps the more cultured listener wouldn't roll her eyes with every swallowed consonant, but it made me impatient and annoyed.

Yes, yes, yes, I know that the book is set in France, that Child felt her spiritual home was France, and that her fame is built on the way she translated French cuisine to the American kitchen. Child's French pronunciation never annoyed me. The narrator's did. I should have read this book rather than listened to it.

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