My Life in France

I've just finished read this book and I feel a little like crying, the way one might when saying goodbye to a dear and much enjoyed friend after a raucous and hilarious long weekend somewhere, knowing you might not see that friend again. I really enjoyed reading this book and am somewhat sad to be at the end of it already.

My interest in French cuisine is minimal, so I've not read any of Child's cook books. I do remember seeing many episodes of her TV show through the years. Really, I was inspired to check out this book because a friend had me watch the movie Julie and Julia, and I was so taken with the Julia Child segments that I wanted to know more. In this book, I found what I had hoped.

This is a personal guided tour through Child's show more discovery of her "spiritual home" and the adventures that came to her because of that discovery. She's honest but generous, friendly without being gushing, enthused without overwhelming bias. To pull out an old, disused word, she's affable. She's amiable. She's a good talker, fun to listen to, with interesting things to say and a sense of humor about it all. She's an optimist, the gloss of which shines up what you know are dark moments for her and which probably buoyed her up through her many years of travel, learning, frustration and work. The view of France she creates is, in my opinion, filtered entirely through the kind of person she was. The book is exactly what the title advertises, and that life in France is worth reading about. show less

Julia Child's memoir of her years in France, her marriage with Paul Child, and her experiences starting the PBS sensation that was The French Chef.

I adored every second of this memoir. Julia Child is such a wonderfully charming personality and she comes to brilliant life in the pages of this book. Her descriptions of her life in France will make anyone anxious to travel abroad, her descriptions of food are positively scrumptious, and her reflections on her life with Paul are very sweet. A fantastic feel-good read. Highly recommended.

A very rose-coloured glasses look on life - through diplomatic postings and local culinary dishes - in post-WII Western Europe and the US.

I can't tell if Child truly was that open and optimistic or if she really had such a charmed life. Upper middle class upbringing, diplomatic posts around Europe, with all the networking that comes with it, making connections that would eventually come in handy for her culinary aspirations. Arguably the most important connection she ever made was with her super-supportive and super-handy husband Paul: what a gorgeous partnership.

With its easygoing prose and the laissez-faire attitude of Child (except when she's writing her famed cooking bible - which was conceived by two other friends who seemed to show more have paled into the background after Child joined the project -, then she's an eagle-eyed dictator/businesswoman), this was very much a fairytale recount of her rise to culinary heights. And just like all the dishes described, the book itself was a delight and leaves one hungry for more.

I would love to read more about just Julia and Paul's marriage, and in particular about Paul's role. There's something about famous couplings where more often than not, one is famous for their work, and the other is famous for being the muse/support. It fascinates me, especially when it's a man who is in the muse/support role (looking at you Leonard Woolf). I also just want a photobook of Paul's works, the ones in this book were gorgeously composed. show less

Heavenly inspiration! I want to be just like Julia Child, not for her cooking but for her enthusiasm for life. She doesn't know things and isn't afraid to ask (huge failing of mine), and when she sets about learning things she does so whole-heartedly. Not just with cooking - she didn't learn to cook a drop until she was 36!! - but in art and world affairs and foreign cultures. Truly, she seems to have said yes to living life, and I think she would have been the best of fun to know.

My favorite bit of advice: "I don't believe in twisting yourself into knots of excuses and explanations over the food you make. When one's hostess starts in with self-depreciations such as "Oh, I don't know how to cook...," or "Poor little me..," or "This may show more taste awful..." it is so dreadful to have to reassure her that everything is delicious and fine, whether it is or not. Besides, such admissions only draw attention to one's shortcomings (or self-perceived shortcomings), and make the other person think, "Yes, you're right, this really IS an awful meal!" Maybe the cat has fallen into the stew, or the lettuce has frozen, or the cake has collapsed - eh bien, tant pis!" (p. 77). show less

I didn't know anything about Julia Child apart from having heard her name and that she was 6' tall until the book Julie and Julia. I read that and whereas I didn't think much of Julie at all (I think she should go back to blogging, a book's a bit much for her) I was curious about Julia.

The book is beautifully written by her nephew Paul Prud'homme and illustrated with many photographs from her talented ex-diplomat husband Paul. Its a lovely story of a life through cooking and inspired by France and full of surprises that you wouldn't expect for someone of her monied, patrician background.

One one of the Goodreads groups I belong to, where everyone besides me is American and, it seems strongly Republican, the book Julie and Julia got many show more negative comments owing to Julie's total disrespect of Republicans and not being respectful enough of the construction of a memorial to 9-ll (I didn't feel that, I thought she was just pissed off with her job, but I'm not an American and there may have been nuances I missed). Needless to say, I don't think that group would enjoy My Life in France either - Julia Child is fiercely anti-Republican and critical of many aspects of American politics which she sees as hypocritical. This causes if not a rift in the family, then her father's coldness and uninterest in her life and husband, as he saw anything less than full enthusiasm for all things Republican (and racist, anti-academic, anti-semitic and xenophobic) to be a betrayal by her of his and his friends' lives and the cultural millieu he had brought her up in. Julia's politics were important to her and she studied assidiously so that she could hold up her end in dinner-table debates with her more knowledgeable friends, often over one of her wonderfully-cooked meals.

The story of how she learned to cook and the various places she and Paul lived in, is beautifully told without either undue self-praise or false modesty. She had a lovely personality, a burning drive to educate people as to how good food (French food) could be and why it was worth the time and effort to make it, and attracted a rich variety of friends whose only link seemed to be they really, really liked food. But it was just as interesting viewing American politics and France through the half century of her life from the 50s until her death five years ago in 2004.

I'm so enthusiastic about reading Julia Child that I've ordered Mastering French Cooking, a huge and expensive tome, and I don't cook, not ever, but I do want to read it. show less

With the Julie/Julia craze, readers will be looking for more about Julia Child. This memoir written by Ms. Julia in her eighties, looks at her life in France, beginning in about 1948 through her return to the US and the ultimate publishing of her two books with Simone Beck.

The wit, determination and joy of Julia Child shines throughout this book. The woman who tells American cooks "you can use canned chicken broth, it's your kitchen, who's going to KNOW!" is almost maniacal in getting a recipe right...testing and retesting, and then testing again with American ingredients (did you know French flour has less gluten than American flour? Makes it hard to get a baguette to turn out right).

My advice...skip Julie and go right to Julia. She is show more a fascinating woman who changed how Americans look at food and cooking. IMHO she's a National Treasure twice over (both for France and the USA :) show less

"This is a book about some of the many things I have loved most in life: my husband, Paul Child; la belle France; and the many pleasures of cooking and eating."

In 1948, Julia Child accompanied her husband Paul to his new U.S. Information Service posting in Paris. She didn't speak French and (surprisingly to me) she didn't really cook. But she was determined to get the most out of the opportunity she'd been given, so she immersed herself in the language, both by taking classes and by getting out into the city, especially its food markets, and talking with the natives. She also decided to take cooking lessons at the Cordon Bleu. Julia eventually started her own cooking lessons with two French friends, and the three of them decided to work show more on a book that would really teach Americans to cook French food, which had become Julia's passion. That book grew from a small volume of recipes her partners (Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle) had already written to the massive, 700+ page (and that was only Volume 1!) Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Back in the U.S. in the 1960s, a cooking demonstration on a Massachusetts public television show led to the first successful cooking show, The French Chef, and Julia became a public icon. (Today, you can visit an exact recreation of her home kitchen at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C.)

Julia Child was a big woman (6' 2") with a big personality, and her whole self really shines through in this memoir. I felt very much as if she was sitting next to me on the couch, telling me stories. In the quote at the top, Julia described her book to a T--the book is as much about a happy, passionate 50-year marriage, and about her love of France (the country and its people), as it is about food. Julia wrote this book with Paul's grandnephew, relying on the hundreds of letters the couple had written home throughout their stay in France. Paul is best known today as Julia Child's husband, but he was an artist and photographer who had photos in the Museum of Modern Art collection, and the book is enlivened by Paul's pictures throughout. (On a previous stay, pre-Julia, in France in the 1920s, Paul had worked on the stained-glass windows at the American Church in Paris. His willingness, despite lifelong vertigo, to climb up into the eaves to work on the high windows earned him the nickname "Tarzan of the Apse.")

A good companion read to this would be As Always, Julia: The Letters of Julia Child and Avis DeVoto. Julia and Avis struck up a pen-pal correspondence when Julia wrote a fan letter to Avis's husband (American historian Bernard DeVoto) regarding a column he'd written about how he hated stainless-steel knives. Avis was instrumental in getting Mastering the Art of French Cooking published, and that long and fascinating process, as well as Julia and Paul's experiences with McCarthyism (which led to their disillusionment with government work and their eventual return to private life), is covered in more detail in their letters than it was in My Life in France.

Julia died before this book was finished, and while I think Alex Prud'homme did an excellent job of maintaining Julia's voice throughout, the end feels a bit disjointed and rushed, but that didn't take away much from the pleasure of reading this book. Just one caution--don't read it on an empty stomach! show less