Of Meat and Men

Getty Images Julia & Julia author Julie Powell lays it all—a messy love affair, obsession with butchering—on the table for a chat with Rachel Kramer Bussel about her new memoir, Cleaving.

Surrounded by giant liquor bottles and sides of beef and pork in Williamsburg’s new hipster butcher shop The Meathook, a chain-smoking Julie Powell seems perfectly at home as she reflects on her latest journey into sex and food. The author, who blogged her way through Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking and saw her memoir Julie & Julia turned into a film starring Meryl Streep and Amy Adams, now says her perspective during that time was one of “innocence.” But below the surface, she felt restless and a need to strike out on her own, to separate in some way from the husband she’d met at 18, her “surrogate soul.” Her second act is chronicled in Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat, and Obsession, which pairs her butchering apprenticeship with her kinky affair with a man named D, as well as a sprinkling of recipes for blood sausage and pork cheeks.

“My exploration of my sexual life felt like something I needed to write about. It makes people uncomfortable. They get embarrassed for me, which I think is adorable.”

Powell acknowledges that there’s “no question” that her fame in the wake of her blogging project affected her marriage. Of her success, she writes, “I accepted the congratulations [b]ut privately, I knew that I owed it entirely to Eric.” When she throws herself into an apprenticeship two hours from her Queens home at “meat hippie” butcher shop Fleisher’s, Eric’s support is strained—all the more so when he discovers her affair, after her BlackBerry goes off one night.

“I don’t think that I would have ever had the affair if Julie & Julia hadn’t done well,” she explains. “I wanted to write about the difficulties of a marriage and [show] that that’s what makes a marriage strong. There are all these people out there who wanted the movie version of our marriage to be this paragon of perfect marital bliss. It’s much more complicated than that.”

Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat, and Obsession By Julie Powell 320 pages. Little, Brown. $24.99. Indeed, the arguments, jealousy, and hurt between Powell and her husband are wrenching to read. Watching movies one night, he thinks she’s surreptitiously checking for texts from her lover, and comments, “What’s the matter? He’s not paying enough attention to you?” Soon Eric takes up with another woman, while Powell maneuvers uneasily between her two lovers, negotiating each relationship along the way, so unwilling to let go of D that she resorts to stalking him at one point. Eventually, though, Powell gets over D and reconnects with Eric, as the couple regroups from the sting of their mutual affairs. “What I wrote in Julie & Julia wasn’t a lie, but it began to seem like a lie in retrospect,” she says. “That wasn’t the endpoint; marriage doesn’t have an endpoint. It moves. I wanted to respect that.”

Early reviews have shown as much squeamishness about the details of her affair as the gorier aspects of tearing apart hunks of meat. “My exploration of my sexual life felt like something I needed to write about,” she says. “It makes people uncomfortable. They get embarrassed for me, which I think is adorable, but if I get unhappy, that’s my problem; you don’t need to worry about me. I don’t like to be a big conspiracy theorist or feminist crazy person, but men have been writing about this for a long time. Maybe I don’t know what the f--- I’m getting into, but I wrote the book, I’m OK with it. You can criticize me all you like, but what you can’t do is say, ‘You’re a skanky, adulterous self-involved twit,’ because I wrote that already! It’s done; yes, that’s true.”