Julie and Julia and Caitlin and Nora
A brief interlude on being a stan, cooking and the fake pearls I wore in high school
Note: I had started drafting an early version of this essay a week before Julie Powell passed away, and it’s coming to you a little over a month after her death. Julie Powell’s work, especially her early blogging, was significant and certainly paved the way for many women writers like myself who write about their own lives. Her candour, wit and unique voice will be sorely missed. It feels sad to be writing about two women I looked up to (my fellow food-loving, witty, Taurean writers!) who are both no longer with us. Sorry to start on a bummer note!
Like many teenagers, I took fashion cues from my favourite movies, but as far as I could tell, no one else in my suburban high school was wearing a faux pearl necklace inspired by Julia Child, and no one else was reading I Feel Bad About My Neck in the cafeteria. I had long loved cooking and writing stories, but Julie and Julia cemented both of those disparate passions as an identity for me to grasp onto. In Nora, I found the perfect outlet for my obsessions – my love of witty romantic comedies, cooking and telling stories.
Like many people in Edmonton, we did not have an air conditioner at home. When it got unbearably hot in the summer, we would go to the movies for some AC. In August 2009, Julie and Julia was the obvious choice at the box office. Me, my mom, my sister and about a hundred old ladies packed into the Cineplex to see Nora Ephron’s final movie.
The film is a double biopic – both of the author Julie Powell (Amy Adams) and the cookbook author and TV personality Julia Child (Meryl Streep). The movie flips between Julie cooking her way through Julia’s famous Mastering the Art of French Cooking, documenting the journey on a blog; and Julia developing her passion for cooking and turning it into a cookbook. That’s the bare bones story, anyway. Really, it’s a story about marriage, about being a fan, about finding your unique voice and not compromising on who you are.
Julie is pretty much a Julia stan, talking nonstop of her Julia admiration to her husband and friends. Julie venerates Julia as a saint, even leaving an offering of butter at the Smithsonian’s Julia Child exhibit, like a sacrifice to a god in a temple. Julie daydreams about her the way I daydreamed about Daniel Radcliffe as a teenager, gazing at the photos of him taped to my locker. Julia’s aesthetic, her biography, her passions – Julie makes herself a Julia expert. This kind of love is so rarely explored on screen, and Ephron does it so deftly. She understands the loving obsession of adoring someone from afar, how obsessions can overtake your life – sometimes in positive, life-changing ways.
Julie’s obsession with Julia mirrored my own Nora Ephron obsession. It’s too bad our names don’t have the consonance of Julie and Julia – if only my parents had named me Noreen! Julie and I both romanticize our heroes. In my mind, Nora never did what I just did (eat a cold piece of quiche out of a Tupperware while writing this essay). Nora wasn’t dishonest about her flaws or secretive about the pain she experienced, but still, in my mind, she’s a domestic goddess. Not like Julia Child or Martha Stewart, though I love both of those women, too. Nora was a woman who loved her work, but put just as much passion and care into her life at home – like she was the one person who figured out how to have it all. She had clear rules for dinner parties and precise recipes for Linguine alla Cecca. Much like with her essays and films, her combination of taste, precision and passion made her a legendary cook (and eater!) amongst her peers.
I daydream about the dinner parties Nora hosted, imagine Joan Didion there smoking a cigarette, arguing about movies and politics with Mike Nichols, scooping a generous portion of poulet au porto into a bowl. These are the kind of insane fantasies I’ve harboured for most of my life, but at least Julie feels the same way, imagining what she would cook for Julia if she got the chance.
I hear Meryl Streep’s affectation of Julia’s voice giddily saying “butter!” while I cook and cut another generous tablespoon of butter off the stick, adding it to my pan of slowly cooking caramelized onions. I’ve followed the recipes in Heartburn with the kind of fervour Julie does Mastering the Art of French Cooking. At my 28th birthday party, I showed off my key lime pie, explaining its significance in Ephron lore. “This is Nora’s recipe,” I say proudly.
Who knows why it was Nora Ephron for me. Why do we pick any of our heroes? Julie grows into her love of Julia, cooking through Julia’s cookbook as an access point for her Julia Child stan-dom. It’s a way for Julie to both learn about Julia, and ape her lifestyle. It’s easy enough to say I watched When Harry Met Sally and Julie and Julia in my formative years; ergo, Nora’s voice has a hold on me. But, as Julie and Julia so expertly articulates, it’s not just the work that we admire. It’s the narrative we construct about the people we admire — we fill in the blanks in their lives and imagine them in aspirational, beautiful hues. We’re not really fantasizing about being Nora Ephron or Julia Child — we’re trying to imagine a world in which we are successful and happy. Hopefully with a really good stand mixer and a hot husband.
Despite all that, Nora is my aspirational figure, making peach pies in her Upper West Side Apartment in between writing and directing. It might be far from my own downtown Edmonton apartment, where dinner parties are potlucks eaten around a square table (not round, sorry, Nora!), and I write essays and reviews, not screenplays. But my aspiration to be more like Nora is a desire to be more myself – a better hostess, a better cook, a better writer, a better friend and sister.