Cleaving

A while ago I wrote about seeing the movie "Julie & Julia." In the comments, L and I talked briefly about Julie Powell's follow-up book (if you can call it that), Cleaving. At the time I hadn't read it yet, but I have to admit my curiosity was provoked by the vitriolic reviews on Amazon. (Honestly, most of the reviewers gave it a 1.) So last Wednesday, I checked it out of the library; and this evening, as I sat around handing out candy to the trick-or-treaters, I finished it.

The ultra-brief summary is this: over several years, Julie Powell had been having an affair with a guy she met in college before she was ever married. But she was not very good at hiding it. Her husband Eric found out, and it caused a lot of turmoil in her marriage. After she published Julie & Julia, she spent six months apprenticing as a butcher while trying to sort out her life. After that six months she was still an emotional mess, so she travelled some. And after a while she got better. Julie Powell shows herself to be obsessive, to have poor impulse control, to be capable of over-the-top emotional tantrums, to be alcoholic. She does not paint a flattering picture of herself. The critics on Amazon panned her writing en route to panning her personality. They said she's a mess and the whole book is Too Much Information and why do we have to read it anyway?

Me, I loved it. OK, I'm not going to get in the ring fighting for my life over whether her prose will echo down through the ages; but shit, she never claimed to be writing Madame Bovary or Othello. She learned to write by blogging, which means that whatever is on her mind goes onto the page; the virtue of blogging is that its very immediacy should make it a more honest medium for us to reveal our faults in. God knows I reveal too many of my faults here. And she certainly reveals plenty of hers. Of course it is possible that all this proves is that I love crazy women: that would certainly explain my taste for "high-maintenance" women like Wife and D, to say nothing of bloggers like Violent Acres. (Naturally none of my invited readers counts as "crazy," though I'm fond of you all anyway.)

What I found uncanny, quite apart from her ability to map her own obsessions so exactly, were the moments that sounded like they had been lifted directly from my marriage to Wife. Right up front, on page 4, she writes:

The nagging voice I've all my life heard in my head, the one people might call addiction or restlessness or waywardness, but which is to me almost an embodiment, something outside of myself, impish, far from benign, but also inspiring and not entirely unconcerned with my self-interest -- Eric believed in it. He feared it sometimes, but he believed in it.

That was us, too. I would never have thought to put it like that, would never have thought to remember that as one of the telling details of our early years together, Wife and me. But she too had the obsessive restlessness that would come on her unawares, as if it were outside herself, pointing her in directions unimagined. And I, too, believed in it. Even when it was scary.

How did Julie Powell manage to write so exactly about my marriage?

I won't say that the rest of it proves to be a carbon copy. No two marriages are ever exactly alike. But there are moments that I recognize. Yes, there are. The one thing I could have wished out of the book is that she had come to more of an understanding of what drove her -- her, and her husband and her lover. She gets to a stable point where things are better and the future looks more hopeful, but she never quite reaches one of those "sweet mystery of life at last I've found you" moments. And it would have been nice if she had. But after all, the main reason I wish she had come to that profound understanding is so that I could appropriate it for my own situation. And if I haven't reached a point of enlightened understanding about my own marriage yet, how can I criticize Julie for failing to do it for me?

Don't read the book if you are squeamish: there are a lot of technical details about the art of butchery that tender minds won't want to know. Don't read the book if you think that the first-person narrator should be a moral exemplar, or even an especially admirable human being. Julie admits in an interview I found somewhere that she is glad her mother has refused to read the book. I don't know what she ever told her mother when she was writing it, but the stories she tells in the book are ones no mother would want to read about her daughter.

But if you are interested in scrutinizing the dynamics of infidelity, to see what makes it tick -- or if you just love crazy women -- it's worth a look.