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Personal writing is often a misnomer for the first-person, nonfiction work it describes.
Its hard to overstate Powells impact on food writing at the turn of the millennium.
How much glorious writing would be explicitly devoted to home cooking without her?
Would we have a Deb Perelman?
Here, the emotional truth is that Powells bighearted, raucous voice was all blog, no tradition.
She was a messy keeper of both house and head.
Her writing was all appetites: food and sex.
Cleanliness, that tiresome neighbor of godliness, would have only gotten in her way.
She had a knack for turning critics into gasping prigs.
Powell started her blog in 2002 and turned it into a book in 2005.
In August 2009, Nora Ephrons film adaptation boosted her profile even more.
IfJulie & Juliahad made Julie Powell a hero to bored home cooks everywhere,Cleavingmade her an anti-hero.
She learns, she travels, she stalks, she fails to reconcile.
Shes no messier in this book than she is in her first, really.
How about the insipid, plastic-wrapped supermarket pork chops that Powell describes as deracinated?
These arent the food words we know, explaining how a food will taste or how its cooked.
Thats what Powells writing does best: It speaks honestly and gives permission.
It doesnt wink and it has no use for innuendo.
It makes its author look like a cruel, heartless person a lot of the time.
Readers peek through their fingers, squirrelly and nauseated.
Even I read parts ofCleavingas if watching a bad horror movie.
Dont send your lover another unanswered email, I groaned, turning pages faster than I could read them.
Jesus Christ, dont buy him apresent!But there, isnt that the best part?
Done well, it tells us the point.
Powell told us the point.
There seemed to be nothing she wouldnt share.
She knew theres no shame in being the same messy, in-love fool that everyone is deep down.
Knowing as she did that tomorrow is another day to maybe get it right.
Tomorrow, start trying to live your life again.
