Cover of paperback edition of "My Life in France"

Tom Cooper, director of the Webster Groves Public Library, reviewed “My Life in France” by Julia Child when it was published. In honor of “Julie & Julia” mania, here’s the April 2006 review of one of the sources for the movie:

‘My Life in France’ By Julia Child with Alex Prud’homme;  Published by Knopf, 317 pages, $25.95
 

By Tom Cooper

In his preface to “My Life in France,” Alex Prud’homme tells of collaborating with Julia Child, his great-aunt who died before the book’s completion. Frail and in her 90s, Child still was an exacting editor who insisted on getting every detail right.

It’s a fitting introduction to the story of how Child worked mightily over many years, first to produce one of the best cookbooks ever written — “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” — and then to almost single-handedly create a media genre: the TV cooking show.

Child never tasted French food, or cooked much of anything, until she was 36 years old. That was when her husband, Paul, a U.S. Foreign Service officer, took her to live in Paris. Her first meal in France, a simple sole meuniere, was an epiphany on the scale of Marcel Proust’s madeleines.

Possessed of immense energy and intellectual curiosity, her life became about French food. She haunted the markets, charcuteries, boulangeries and cheese shops of Paris. She attended the Cordon Bleu cooking school and fought its narrow-minded bureaucracy, which frowned on women taking professional courses, to earn certification as a chef.

Along the way she met two French women, Louisette Bertholle and Simone Beck, who were working on a cookbook for the American publisher Houghton Mifflin. The three started a cooking school, and Child became the third collaborator on the book.

At her prodding, what had been planned as a modest introduction to French cuisine became a magnum opus aimed at teaching Americans all the basic techniques and hundreds of the recipes of la cuisine francaise. Houghton Mifflin rejected this expanded manuscript, finding it too long, too involved and without an audience among busy American housewives.

How the manuscript of a classic work then went begging for a publisher is a great story of modern book publishing. It was finally rescued from a reject pile by Alfred A. Knopf editor Judith Jones — the same editor who in 1948 salvaged the already rejected manuscript for a little book that eventually was published as “Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl.”

One never reads about Julia Child’s life without being drawn as well to the fascinating character of Paul Child. An accomplished poet, painter and photographer (many of his lovely photographs of Paris and Marseilles illustrate the book), he eventually yielded to the force of nature that was his wife and turned his talents to assisting her career.

Involving on so many levels, “My Life in France” is for people who are interested in cooking, in the world of book publishing, in Europe’s postwar years, in how a life led to no purpose can be turned around by finding a single inspiring interest, or in how a couple, passionately devoted to one another, can work together to create a life mutually enriching and beneficial to them both.

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Tom Cooper is director of the Webster Groves Public Library.

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