Soul Food
Julie Powell, the author, blogger, and inspiration for the film Julie & Julia, discusses living in New York, missing Austin, and seeing her life on the big screen.
Photo by Kelly Campbell
In an interview with Texas Monthly, the author and blogger Julie Powell admits that she’s not a huge blog reader, and that she became a New Yorker when she wasn’t looking. Her success as a blogger and writer? “I got very, very lucky.” She talks about how surreal it was to watch the film adaptation of her book, Julie & Julia, and why she loves her hometown, Austin, Texas. Her next book, Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat, and Obsession, is set to come out in December.
Austin is home for you, right?
Yes, I don’t get back nearly as much as I want to, but [my husband] Eric and I both have lots of family in Austin, so we definitely get back to Austin once or twice a year. And I love it. I love Austin.
Living in New York City, what do you miss the most about Texas? The least?
It’s funny. When I first moved out of Austin, when I went to school in Massachusetts, really that’s why I began cooking, because to my mind, as a Texan, people in the northeast don’t know how to cook. So I spent my college years desperately trying to recreate everything I missed from home—enchiladas to gumbo to chicken fried steak to whatever—and that really was the spark that started the cooking in the first place.
Obviously, New York is a pretty good eating town too but not in the same way that Austin is. Every time I come back, I just make a complete pig of myself because so much of the food that I grew up with and I love, you just can’t get it up there. So definitely the food is one thing, and then you know, it’s just everything in Austin is a little bit easier.
What do I miss least? I can’t even say it’s the heat because New York summers are ten times worse than Austin because it’s muggy, and New York has not mastered air conditioning the way that Texas has. And you’re going in and out of subways where it’s hysterically hot on the subway platform, and then you climb into this frigid subway car and you get back out. It’s this hot-cold hot-cold; absolutely miserable.
But I think what I miss least—God, that’s really hard—driving all of the time. I mean, I like driving, but I also love the luxury of being able to climb into the subway and see where it will take me and walk to places and, you know, it’s a little more difficult in most parts of Texas to just walk to the grocery store, both because of the weather and because the distances are just that much longer. So yes, I love being in a very walkable city.
Do you think you’ll ever move back?
You know, Eric and I talk about this all of the time, and I think he’d really like to move back, and I am a little more ambivalent, not because I don’t want to move back, but I think I’ve become a New Yorker when I wasn’t looking. I’ve been there for fourteen years. My mother would be horrified, but yeah, I’ve become very attached to New York.
But you know, the one thing I will say is that having lived first in Austin and then in New York, I’ve become such a snob about places to live. There are so few places, and especially since I’ve been on book tour, and I’ve visited all of these cities, and you know, it would be nice to visit a place for a while, but I find—I don’t know how to say this—I find so many places inauthentic.
Everyone is trying to be the New York of the Midwest or the L.A. of Florida, or trying to instill some New York histor-culture into this Podunk town in Indiana or whatever it is. And Austin is itself. Austin is not trying to be anything else, and as long as that’s true, it remains one of the few places I’d consider living in other than New York because I know it’s not striving to be something else. And you know, that’s something I fear for Austin as it becomes more of a player.
How involved were you in adapting your book to the Julie & Julia screenplay?
I wasn’t very involved in the film. I was really watching it from the outside. At the very beginning, as Nora [Ephron] was embarking on writing the screenplay, we sat down for a couple of lunches, and she asked a lot of very incisive and tough and sort of scary questions. She then took what I gave her, and she took the blog, and she went back in her room and wrote a Nora Ephron screenplay and it became very much her baby.
And so I was kind of on the outside. They were kind enough to let me sit in on some filming one day with Meryl [Streep] for a few minutes, and I was able to take a look at the screenplay, but yes, I was very much on the outside. So sitting down and seeing the movie for the first time, it was…I mean, it’s almost too obvious to say, but it was surreal and impossible to watch it the first time through. It was impossible to watch it as a movie. You can’t make any kind of judgments on it; you’re just sitting there, sort of trying to keep breathing while you watch this version of your story.
You know, in the months leading up to it, I thought I did a really good job preparing myself, saying I know this is a movie…it’s not my book. It’s three steps away from my experience. Julie Powell is a fictional character in a comedy movie. Yet still, when you’re actually faced with it the first time, it’s breathtaking—just the shear implausibility that I would’ve gotten this far. You know, the first blog about Potage Parmentier [potato and leek soup] to sitting in the theater with Meryl Streep, sitting behind me watching the screening. That took me a while to get used to. I’ve seen it five times now, so I’m a little more used to it.
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