Julie Powell

At 29, she started a blog about her attempt to make every recipe in Julia Child's “Mastering the Art of French Cooking.” The project led to a book and ...

New York (AP) -- Food writer Julie Powell, who became an internet darling after blogging for a year about making every recipe in Julia Child's “Mastering ...

Food blogger was played by Amy Adams in the film inspired by her memoir, about attempting to cook more than 500 Julia Child recipes in a year.

It was the last film written and directed by Nora Ephron, who died in 2012. – and so gloriously unmoored to any tradition … [wrote about Powell’s project in the New York Times in 2003](https://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/13/dining/a-race-to-master-the-art-of-french-cooking.html), said in an email after her death: “Her writing was so fresh, spirited – sometimes crude!

Powell gained fame for attempting to make every recipe in Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking – leading to a book and a Hollywood movie.

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Powell died of cardiac arrest at her home in New York on October 26.

"People don't want the mystery anymore." Powell revealed she had an affair, the pain of loving two men at once, of her fondness for sadomasochism and even a bout of self-punishing sex with a stranger. At one point, while cutting the connective tissue on a pig's leg, she writes: "It's sad, but a relief as well, to know that two things so closely bound together can separate with so little violence, leaving smooth surfaces instead of bloody shreds." That kind of physical skill is really foreign to me, and I'm really envious of that." "We are sending our deepest condolences to all who knew and loved Julie, whether personally or through the deep connections she forged with readers of her memoirs". Her death was confirmed by Judy Clain, Powell's email and editor in chief of Little, Brown.

Powell was played by Amy Adams in Nora Ephron's hit 2009 film, which also starred Meryl Streep.

Julie Powell was an inspiration to my generation of food bloggers, and was hilarious and kind in our interactions, especially when discussing our home state of Texas. Cooking through Julia Child's books, she made Child relevant to a new generation, and wrote about cooking in a fresh, conversational, this-is-my-real life tone that was rare back then.— smitten kitchen (@smittenkitchen) "There was a lot of jumping over cords and almost tripping on stuff that was stacked on the floor. I threw the food mill down, there's watercress everywhere, I was sobbing." "The last thing in my head would be to exploit her in any way. Sending my condolences to her family and friends.— Lisa Fain (@homesicktexan) On Twitter last week, she had complained of feeling ill. But all of them were looking for help in a way that we were not always equipped to give. "There were quite a few dinners at 11pm or midnight. But at the same time, I totally get it." There were always leftovers, and sometimes like a big hunk of pig's leg just sort of stuck in there." "Which of course is extremely painful to hear," Powell said.

The food writer rose to prominence with her blog-turned-book-turned-movie, "Julie & Julia."

It later came out as a paperback titled "Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously." She documented her experiment — the trials, errors and victories — on a blog for Salon.com titled the "Julie/Julia Project." We mourn her loss with her husband Eric and her family," Judy Clain, Powell's editor and the editor-in-chief of Little, Brown, said in a statement. Her husband, Eric Powell, told The Times the cause of death was cardiac arrest. "We are sending our deepest condolences to all who knew and loved Julie, whether personally or through the deep connections she forged with readers of her memoirs. 26 at her home in upstate New York.

Julie Powell, the late author of Julie & Julia and Cleaving, was one of the last of the truly personal writers. It's hard to overstate Powell's impact on ...

The promise of personal writing is that readers get to actually fulfill their desire for the point of the story — the real story, I mean, the thing that we all live at once and don’t get to edit. But in her first book she makes a mess of her own life, and in her second she makes a mess of her husband’s — and, worse, does not waste one sentence on castigating herself for it. It makes its author look like a cruel, heartless person a lot of the time. Cleaving tells the story of Powell’s destructive extramarital affair and her apprenticeship as a butcher. Or if pork chops aren’t to your taste, maybe you’ll prefer Powell’s freshly trussed crown roast, a “sexy little she-roast” that she can’t resist describing as “sluttish.” These aren’t the food words we know, explaining how a food will taste or how it’s cooked. Powell started her blog in 2002 and turned it into a book in 2005. In the lawless international waters of the early blogosphere, Powell’s blog, The Julie/Julia Project, was notable for its humor and for the really great bit at its core. She was a messy keeper of both house and head. [ New York Times review of Julie & Julia](https://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/02/books/review/julie-and-julia-the-servantless-american-cook.html) is really about how the critic wishes today’s young women would not be so crass as to write about things like donating eggs to pay off debt and living in squalid apartments. Not so for Julie Powell, the late author of Julie & Julia and Cleaving, and the last of the truly personal writers. Like Powell, I find that the emotional truth in an interpretation of the world is more important than the factual one and, anytime the two are in conflict, it’s best to hew to the emotional. “Personal writing” is often a misnomer for the first-person, nonfiction work it describes.

Julie Powell, who died last week at age 49, democratized and humanized food writing in her "Julie & Julia" blog about cooking Julia Child's recipes.

“She was irreverent and cranky, ranting about married life and disasters in the kitchen, recording her meltdowns and triumphs,” Jacobs says. Lebovitz draws a line from her freewheeling, warts-and-more blog posts to the current state of food media, where personality and voice are often prized above technical prowess or plaudits from prestigious institutions. “After her, thousands of imitators followed,” she says. But Powell, whose early success coincided with the rising popularity of the Food Network and its stable of stars, had the last, unfiltered word. She tore down that wall by being outrageous and vulnerable and off-the-cuff and moody and all of the things you’re not supposed to be as a professional food writer.” [early blog post](https://web.archive.org/web/20021116220820/http://blogs.salon.com/0001399/2002/09/25.html), before describing a success with Child’s poulet poele a l’estragon. Her project spawned a crop of bloggers who launched their own “cook-through” projects in which they cooked (and wrote) their way through classic culinary tomes, including “ But Powell herself was contemptuous of most establishment food writing and never set out to ape it. And I never could understand it,” she wrote in an " 'Julie and Julia’ still has too much blog in its DNA: It has a messy, whatever’s-on-my-mind incontinence to it, taking us places we’d rather not go,” he sniffed. It was the kind of thing you couldn’t even describe as “confessional” because there was no apology implied. They began a cultural phenomenon that would nurture a new generation’s affection for Child and her butter-laden cuisine, prompting 20-somethings — who weren’t just “servantless,” as Child described her readers, but also lacking cooking skills and much money — to attempt classics such as beef bourguignon and lobster thermidor in their own group house and studio kitchens.