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Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat, and Obsession

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Julie Powell thought cooking her way through Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking was the craziest thing she'd ever do -- until she embarked on the voyage recounted in her memoir, Cleaving .

Her marriage challenged by an insane, irresistible love affair, Julie decides to leave town and immerse herself in a new butchery. She finds her way to Fleischer's, a butcher shop where she buries herself in the details of food. She learns how to break down a side of beef and French a rack of ribs -- tough physical work that only sometimes distracts her from thoughts of afternoon trysts.

The camaraderie at Fleischer's leads Julie to search out fellow butchers around the world -- from South America to Europe to Africa. At the end of her odyssey, she has learned a new art and perhaps even mastered her unruly heart.

337 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 2009

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About the author

Julie Powell

8 books331 followers
Julie Powell was born and raised in Austin, Texas, where she first fell in love with cooking — and her husband, Eric. She was the author of a cooking memoir, Julie & Julia, which was released in 2005. Her writing has appeared in Bon Appétit, The New York Times, House Beautiful, and Archaeology Magazine, among others.

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Displaying 1 - 30 of 1,087 reviews
Profile Image for Ciara.
Author 3 books371 followers
January 20, 2010
i hated this book. i read julie & julia &, you know, i didn't think julie powell was the next shakespeare or anything, but she managed to pull together a better book than most bloggers-turned-authors out there. i was engaged with the story. i enjoyed the prose in an auto-pilot brain kind of way. i figured this book would be more of the same--philosophical insights about her personal life shared through a prism of foodie-ness. & i guess that's what it was, but it was also unspeakably horrible.

what's going on in her personal life here is that she has started an affair with some lame-seeming dude who she already had one affair with in college. it doesn't sound like the dude is much to write home about in the looks or personality departments, but julie thinks the sex they have is really hot. everyone should have at least one sexual partner in their life that can provide them with really hot times, & if that involves a little S&M action, i'm not here to judge. but most of us learn by the time we are julie's age (or far, far younger) that those sex hijinks are not for public consumption! i've had my share of good times, but i don't kid myself that anyone wants to read a book about them! i definitely DID NOT want to read a book about julie powell's douchebaggy lover leaving bruises all over her body while she observes his left-handed jacking off methods.

let me just say that at one point, julie writes very specifically about searching for the one image of her lover that is available on the internet (this is after he wised up, realized that she is batshit crazy, & cut her completely out of his life). it's his facebook default profile picture, in which he is wearing a "ben sherman shirt" that she had purchased for him. this brings me to another aspect of the book that i hated: julie dropping little references like that into the text like it's supposed to help us relate to her. when i think of ben sherman shirts, i think of dudes who are just as big of douchebags as dudes who wear ed hardy, but they prefer a somewhat preppier plaid button-down look to the ed hardy surfer schlub style. i don't think of hot sexxxin'.

another example is when julie writes about the guy who runs the butershop where she apprentices. apparently he has a great big ironic mustache & a t-shirt that says, "guns don't kill people, people with mustaches kill people." hilarious. oh wait. we all know about threadless, dude. & aren't ironic t-shirts a little circa 2000? the saddest part of all is that julie found this dumbass t-shirt amusing enough to include it in her PUBLISHED MEMOIR, which is sure to linger on library sale shelves long after the author herself stops finding ironic mustache humor the cutting edge of comedy.

& ALSO on this note is julie's non-stop obsession with "buffy, the vampire slayer". now, i know it's a popular TV show...i just don't think JULIE knows it's a popular TV show. the way she writes about it, you'd think it was this really edgy cult discovery she'd made because she is just right there, balanced on the precipice of the cutting edge. she liberally sprinkles buffy quotes throughout the book, to do big things like describing her entire basic life philosophy. it all strikes me as very sad. when people use cultural touchstones in such a lazy, self-absorbed way...i can't help it, it screams stupidity to me. julie powell did not seem stupid in her first book, & perhaps it's even too strong a term to use here. but i at least walked away from the first book thinking she'd be a laugh at a dinner party. i walked away from this one thinking she'd be a dullard. she really should have walked away with one book under her belt...or taken more time to make sure her follow-up wasn't just a sloppy, self-centered rush job designed to capitalize on the success of the "julie & julia" film.

okay, so...she's having this affair. of course her husband finds out, because, as she incessantly tells us, they are likes two halves of a whole, they seem to share a mind, blah blah. i gotta feel for eric if THIS is the mind he's sharing. then again, i guess it gives him plenty of room to stretch out. he begins his own affair, but i guess the sex isn't as hot because he ends it after a while. he wants julie to end her affair as well, but she seems to be on some kind of self-destructive, sex-obsessed warpath & won't do it. plus she's always sneaking into the bathroom to surrptitiously check for messages from her lover on her blackberry, even though she knows her husband knows her passwords & occasionally reads her messages. which isn't cool of him, but it's not like she's not giving him reason to be suspicious, you know?

basically, instead of sounding like a couple that is so much in love that they can stick it out even through these kinds of betrayals, they sound like a couple of fucked up, alcoholic assholes who are spinning themselves a fantasy that maybe they would have outgrown by now if they hadn't started dating when they were teenagers. they seem to still have a bullshit teenage perception of what it means to be "in love". mark my words, these two will be divorced within three years.

julie's obsessive relationship with her lover is emblematic of her relationship with men in general. when she's at the butchershop, her whole bag is trying to be one of the boys, listening to their gross, sexist jokes & telling gross, sexist jokes of her own to show how unaffected she is. when she goes on her ridiculous butchery world tour (way to rip off eat pray love ), her whole bag is trying to be as attractive to as many men as possible. & supposedly it works. apparently all of the men in argentina are just fascinated with her, & it never seems to occur to her that maybe they are just interested in getting some tail & are not actually all that taken with HER particular womanly gifts. she makes out with a maasai warrior in africa, & we are treated to a good 25 pages of some other dude on the african tour attempting to sexually assault her in her tent while she wussily fought back, castigated herself for being a wuss, castigated herself for not yelling for help, castigated herself for telling people about it the next day, castigated herself for probably getting the dude fired, & so on. it was like fifty years of fucked up responses to sexual assault, boiled down into one person's recollection of a single experience that lasted maybe twelve hours (from time of attempted to assault to getting her phone back & leaving the site). it was kind of sickening.

& all of this is mixed with hackneyed metaphors involving butchery, & more information that i ever needed about how to chop up various animal parts. the food aspects of julie & julia were certainly present, but i don't remember them being so heavy on the technical detail & relentlessly dull. maybe she just had lightning in a bottle with that first book, & she tried to re-capture the dynamic with this second book & everything came out clunky. i feel bad for the editor. i feel bad for any of her family or friends who tries to read this book. i feel bad for julie & any of her loved ones that read these reader reviews. but dear god, if she does read them, i hope she learns something. i hope she grows the fuck up, gets some counseling for her self-esteem issues (really? you wore boots & a skirt in new york city & no man could take his eyes off you for the entire day? a) i doubt that. b) why do you care so much? you are a PUBLISHED AUTHOR whose debut memoir was turned into a blockbuster movie starring two A-list hollywood actresses. doesn't that trump some greasy asshole in washington square checking out your ass? he'd be doing it if you were wearing sweatpants, trust me!) & alcoholism (two bottles of wine a night, alone? that is scary. the guys at the liquor store have nicknamed your favorite brand after you? problematic), & takes more time to truly craft her next book. maybe she actually is a decent author. or maybe julie & julia was a fluke.
Profile Image for La Petite Américaine.
208 reviews1,495 followers
May 16, 2010
Look.

Let's be honest here.

No one likes Julie Powell.

We all bought her first book because of the lovable giant that is Julia Child and the story of a promising culinary project. We had enough of those pleasant distractions to kindly ignore the loudmouth attention-whore Julie Powell, despite the fact that she was running around the background screaming "Look at me! Look at me, damn you!!" (What do you want to bet she was a theater major?)

The problem is, her followup gives us none of the positive and all of the negative from Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen: no Julia Child, no ambitious cooking project, and lots more of Julie Powell. Now, ask yourself: would YOU want to read the true story of a fat, ugly, mildly famous chick's crumbling marriage, her unabashed accounts of rough sex with her lover and complete strangers, all held together by the glue that is ... (wait for it) ... the art of butchery? Occasionally spiced up with her weird, dated and nerdy fascination with the 90's serial Buffy The Vampire Slayer? Dotted with her musings about marriage as she tanks a bottle and a half of wine each night? Would you REALLY want to read this?

Yeah, me neither.

That's precisely why this book sucks. Julie forgot us, her meager little audience, and she thinks we actually give a fuck about her life instead of her cooking projects. Here's a hint, Julie: we don't give a shit.

You know what you do after the success of Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen? You write a sequel about world cuisine a là Anthony Bourdain. Or you attempt recreating dishes from imperial menus in the 1500s and let us know how it turns out. Or you get a job at the Food Network and write a book spilling all the dirt on their chefs (does The Barefoot Contessa really have sex with her husband, or does she eat her feelings??; is Emeril gay??; is Giada bulimic??)

But guess what you don't do?

You don't publish autobiographical trash that no one gives a baker's fuck (no pun intended) about. We're your readers, not your girlfriends. Save it for your shrink.

Profile Image for Rachel Cooper.
8 reviews1 follower
September 26, 2009
I only kept going to the end because I was REALLY hoping that her poor long-suffering husband would kill her. He didn't.
Profile Image for Jennifer.
1,101 reviews10 followers
February 23, 2010
After reading Cleaving, I can't decide if this is a memoir from the James Frey school of memoirs (i.e. details and events are so outrageous as to seem more fictional than not) or if Julie Powell is actually telling the truth and therefore needs some serious serious mental health help.

This really isn't the story of Powell learning to butcher. Instead, it's the story of Powell's trainwreck marriage and personal life, which is so gruesome that you *want* to look away, but you just *can't*. After all, she's a real person and she's putting this out there for all the world to see, although one can't really figure out WHY.

It all begins when Powell receives a call from an old flame wanting to meet up for lunch. This flame, whom she had had a relationship with in college while her then-boyfriend-now-husband was studying abroad for a year, was immediatly able to get her back in bed and she proceeded to have a two+ year affair with him.

Her husband found out.

She continued the affair.

The husband had an affair of his own.

Then he broke off his affair, and wanted her to stop hers.

She wouldn't.

Powell tries really hard to convince her readers that this is all okay.

I'm pretty sure she wants her readers to actually feel sorry for her and sympathize with her terrible predicament of being torn between her loving, supportive husband who she describes as one half of her whole (and seriously though, he's as messed up as she is really, so you can't feel any sympathy for him as the wronged party) and her wild, exciting (read: he likes to hit and bite her while they are in bed together, so much so that she has marks and bruises all over her body that she can't hide) lover.

And to top it all off, after the lover ends the affair, she decides the right thing to do is have sex with a stranger in a doorway of some anonymous NYC building. Yeah, that was a good idea!

I can't feel any sympathy for her. All I feel is pity. It isn't until she mentions her Bipolar/alcoholic grandmother and mother that I feel all the pieces clicking into place. I'm not a doctor, but I play one on the internet. Julie Powell needs some serious help, and I hope she gets it.

And the really sad part is that decent writing could have made this book at least somewhat palatable. The prose is overblown and the deepest shade of purple. The timeline jumps back and forth so many times that it's almost impossible to keep what's happening when straight in the reader's mind. In short, there's a reason why this book is already on the clearance rack in bookstores and why it's average rating here and at Amazon.com is two stars or less.



Profile Image for Danielle.
17 reviews1 follower
April 14, 2013
Stop ranting about the evils of Julie Powell. I've been reading a lot of horrible reviews of this book, and I can't help but think these readers are just barking up the wrong tree. Either these people loved the quaint life promoted in Julie & Julia too much, they take literary achievement too seriously, or they just plain have no experience to relate to. If you have never lost an important relationship in your life due to your own destructive nature, keep scrolling down the reading list. You will not understand this woman's predicament. Not many of us understand why she chose to grandstand it in a book, but I totally empathized with her experience entirely. If your own life has turned from perfect to gritty, you will either sympathize or empathize while learning something along the way.

We are brought into her life rather suddenly amidst an affair that she's having against the loyal husband we recall from her first book, julie&julia, and she's already aware of her downward spiral. So she entertains us by becoming a butcher's apprentice, weaving her education of breaking down meat into the unravelling of her personal life. For some, both of these accounts unsettle the stomach, and to you I say too bad. This is how life works. People cheat and you eat hamburgers, well, lets talk about how both of those things happened.

The story of Julie 's life is troublesome and awkward, but avoid the arrogance of thinking that we don't deserve on some level the horrid relationship experiences that we all endure. A relationship falling apart is never an even scale and is never entirely tipped to one side, either. One person may do something drastic but they had your help getting there. Either a person is enabled or pushed away. i learned about this book in 2009 when I could feel my life pulling at its seams but I had just enough energy to keep it together. I knew that "cleaving" would be the seam ripper i was afraid of. I wanted nothing to do with it. It was only this year, after that seam finally ripped entirely anyway, that i decided to pick it up. I'm really glad I did.

If you've ever felt like you deserved to die, you'll feel normal reading this. If your life has never been touched by the darkness that is hurting those you love, skip it, because we don't need you feeling better than the rest of us.
353 reviews7 followers
October 7, 2010
Oh boy. The essence of Julie Powell's new book centers around her two year affair with a sleazy, unattractive loser she knew from college (her husband Eric knows and instead of taking a stand that she end it, just makes passive-aggressive quips about it).

Between all the obsession, there's an alternating story about Julie as she learns the art of butchering. The two stories have virtually nothing to do with each other and I suspect the butchery was just thrown in as some sort of an attempt at a new "foodie" hook so she could fulfill her obligation to her publisher. I'm not suggesting that's wrong, by the way, just that in considering the book overall, it didn't feel organic.

Structurally, the book is a complete mess. It reads like shrapnel -- bits and pieces of meat hacking and salacious sexual details morphing into a big pile of bloody cluelessness. The butchering story has no arc, nor does the infidelity (D ends things, not her, and later, at the end, she alludes to the fact that Eric is still seeing his "girl," and she's fine with that). If that weren't bad enough, there are recipes inexplicably thrown in the text at random, the tone of which were so wildly out of place I had to wonder if the book had even been edited.

There's no perspective in these pages. No reflection. Not only does Julie feel no true sorrow for her selfish behavior, you get the feeling she'd do it again in a second if the opportunity arose. She's learned nothing by the end, nor, does it seem, that she wanted to.
Profile Image for Meg.
131 reviews1 follower
July 11, 2010
May we (I speak for the collective of goodreads here) puh-lease add a "negative" star rating, simply and exclusively for Cleaving? Please! If I could give it less I would, but I will settle for a mere "didn't like it" when indeed I hated it. Why did I finish it? I'm embarrassed to say I was rooting for the husband in the end. I was hoping against hope that he would man up and leave this egotistical, manic depressive, selfish, negative, attention seeking slut I used to call a good writer. How could she? How could she waste such a once in lifetime opportunity? How could she hurt so many people? How could she squander world travel and be so unappreciative of a lovely life? How could be pretend to be modest? How could she subject all of us going blindly into her second book by revealing too much and hopefully exaggerating what was despicable behavior? How could she abandon her dog? (I no longer care about Eric, her pathetic husband.) How could she be such a ridiculous alcoholic?

BUT.

How could anyone like this book?

I have denounced my respect for Julie Powell and refuse to read any further writings of hers. Despite having LOVED Julie/Julia looooong before it was even considered for a movie, LOVED the story, the concept, the execution - I will turn my face in disgust from anything spawned from her brain. On a moral level. I can appreciate good writing, but not when I disagree with it on such a basic level. Phooie on you Julie. Shame. I am embarrassed that you are a representation of those of us who love and respect food. How dare you.

Ok, I am done.

Well, actually, not really. I just can't stand to get myself so ridiculously worked up over something I have moved on from.

Done.
Profile Image for Erika.
16 reviews16 followers
February 12, 2010
As Dorothy Parker once said, "This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force."

This book was dense, intensely personal, grotesque, in the same way that a microscope can be grotesque in its intimate examination, and not that much fun to read, which was really the killing blow.

The butchery sections were interesting, even poetic, but the heavy-handedness of her constant relation of how she saw her marriage and affair in comparison with what she learned as a butcher makes me wish for a red pen and the courage to deface a library book.

The ending wasn't very well-formed or thought out, despite the attempted-epic feel of the world-traveling that seems tacked on to the tale of literal butchery.

At the end, I am left with nothing but the sense that the author has these epiphanies about her marriage and her life in spite of herself, not because of herself.

All in all, I'm glad I didn't buy this book, but instead picked it up from the library. This is one I won't be sorry to return to the shelves, only sorry that someone else is eventually going to pick it up.
Profile Image for Laura.
776 reviews47 followers
December 16, 2009
Julie Powell's life is falling apart and it is ALL HER FAULT. She's cheating on her husband with a man she previously cheated on him with in college. She falls in love with the man and even considers leaving her husband for him, even as the lover pulls away from her and stops returning her calls. As the book progesses, she continues to pull away from her loving and supportive husband and desperately and needily clings to the lover, stalking him and purchasing $300 french scarves for him even after things are broken off. Seeking the same thrill she gets with the lover, D, she engages in anonymous sex encounters that leave her hollow and angry, sending D text messages about what he made her do.

Julie (I feel comfortable calling her Julie rather than Ms. Powell since her name was in her first book, and after all she describes her sex life very vividly, so we can afford to be a little familiar) also does some butchery in t his book. But it's almost an afterthought. As one of the many who read Julie and Julia and ended up loving the bits about Julia and the bits about food, but HATING Julie, this book takes it to the nth degree. I would have loved to read more about the butchery. I wanted to be a butcher for a large chunk of my childhood, at the age when the other girls planned on being ballerinas. I did NOT care to read more about how she leaves her blackberry lying around with sexy text messages that she refuses to delete so that her husband can read them. I don't want to read about her being in love with one man, but refusing to even contemplate divorcing another.

The whole time, Julie admits her failings with unflinching honesty. Normally, this would be a good thing in a memoir, but with Julie, she admits shocking things as if she is daring you to judge her. Her grandmother was an alcoholic, and Julie drinks at least two glasses of wine every night, turning to more alcohol the moment she is angry or the relationship is on the rocks. She talks in Buffyisms and describes her "special" oneness with her husband, and seems to think she is unique, as if EVERY COUPLE EVER didn't feel that way about their spouse, having a secret shorthand language, spouting pop culture quotes and knowing them instantly from context. It is not special.

Mostly, I think Julie treats the reader the same way she treats Eric. She brandishes her faults and shortcomings, daring us to judge her, saying things first so that we cannot wound her. Then, as she confesses and breaks down, she truly just wants us to absolve her. She leaves her blackberry around BEGGING Eric to discover the affair, and riles him up, hoping that he will finally break and force her to do penance for what she has done, end up forgiving her since she cannot forgive herself. I do not want to be involved, I don't want to absolve her.
Profile Image for Jamie.
1,222 reviews70 followers
January 30, 2010
I haven't read or seen Julie and Julia. So I had no opinion on Julie Powell one way or another, except that I think the casting of Amy Adams probably means to an extent at least she was a bit of a sweetheart.

So, to me, the first half of this audio deserves 5 stars. To follow up your momsy bestseller with a book in which you juxtapose butchery and buggery deserves my applause. She is FEARLESS in talking about her desire for rough sex, her extramarital affair, and her obsessions. As well as talking about what she's learning in the butcher shop, which is helping her get through her confusion.

I identified a lot with Powell, superficially, she has a Siamese cat, she has rosacea, she likes champagne. She gets obsessed. She overanalyzes. She likes approval from others. She occasionally has self destructive impulses. For the part of the book set in the butcher shop, I really couldn't understand why the backlash, unless it was all moral.

then, well, it turned into "Eat Pray Love." Totally. a woman in an unsatisfying marriage tries to find herself by going to 3 countries, in this case Argentina, Ukraine and Tanzania. I mean REALLY. It was the same freaking book!

Also, she lets me know during this part that she hates sports! and likes Buffy the Vampire Slayer!

5 stars for the first part, 2 stars for the 2nd part, 4 stars for the narration.
Profile Image for Stephen.
847 reviews13 followers
Read
September 13, 2010
To Julie's Editor: DO YOUR FUCKING JOB!

To Julie's Publisher: All future Powell books will be returned unsold, so don't bother. She was clearly a one-hit wonder.

To the douchebag men who want to bang slutbag Julie: Just run and avoid this hot mess.

To Julie: You had so much potential and you absolutely, positively blew it. Your immature little brain just couldn't help itself and you let your truly sickening view of stranger fucking weigh more heavily in your book (not to mention your life and your marriage) than your love of the craft of writing. Did you think this autobiographical monstrosity was edgy and cool? It wasn't. It was closer to the transcription of a sex-tape.

I admit that while I did not particularly like reading about your personality quirks in 'Julie & Julia', I still did manage to respect the writing therein. Here, I hated both author and the writing. Intensely!

You know, it actually offends me to know that long after your shitty little book is long gone from the bookstore shelves that it will still exist in mildewy garage sale boxes, flea market bins, and Goodwill stores across the country for decades until the silverfish digest and poop out your words. Let's hope that those silverfish will love devouring your book -- no one else will.
Profile Image for Elevate Difference.
379 reviews87 followers
January 28, 2010
Julie Powell wrote a blog called the Julie/Julia Project, which was turned into a book entitled Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously, and last summer Julie & Julia hit the big screen as a movie featuring Meryl Streep. Admittedly, Julie & Julia was a heartwarming, sticky sweet account of Powell’s mission to cook her way through Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking. The blog/book/movie led us to believe that Powell was a somewhat quirky woman who loved to cook, occasionally cursed, and had a ridiculously lovely marriage.

In Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat, and Obsession, we learn that the public image Powell carefully crafted wasn’t true to form. Cleaving will surely smash any goody two shoes image fans may have had of Julie Powell. Though it does feature a few recipes and go into great detail about butchery, these things are more of an afterthought; Powell’s fucked up marriage and obsessive extramarital affair take center stage.

Out of the blue Powell decides to take up butchering and because she’s a go-getter, she sets out to obtain an apprenticeship at a butcher shop to the great confusion of her husband. Apparently it’s just a strong compulsion she feels. I call bullshit on that. It’s obvious to me that this would make an unlikely, though interesting second book idea. Perhaps her editors were breathing down her neck, or maybe Powell needed some kind of food-related slant to pacify her foodie fans while still being able to dissect her marriage in print. But it seems unlikely that it doesn’t just suddenly occur to a thirty-three-year-old to be a butcher. This is the same woman who famously dreaded boning a duck for months, after all.

During the months leading up to her apprenticeship, Powell’s marriage to her long-time husband Eric is falling apart thanks to a torrid love affair with a man she calls D. She cheated on Eric once before with D. while in college and when he calls her sometime after her Julie & Julia fame, the two pick up where they left and thus begin the meat metaphors. While hacking away at some animal, Powell will force a metaphor out of the skin and bones and sinew. Did you know that when “one has eaten a beautiful dry-aged steak, one remembers it, longs for it? That longing doesn’t stop. At least, it hasn’t yet and it doesn���t feel like it’s going anywhere.” Is she talking about the steak or D.? Oh Julie Powell, you’re clever.

In certain areas of her life Powell boasts that she’s tough as nails; she’s just “one of the guys.” She won’t ask for help in the butcher shop, won’t admit she’s afraid of using tools that could slice off arms or decapitate her. Julie Powell is a warrior, except when it comes to D. If he doesn’t respond to a text or e-mail, Powell goes off the deep end; sobbing, going through two bottles of wine a night, writing and calling him obsessively, even stalking him. These situations don’t illustrate the fragility of Powell, but rather her need for serious medication and therapy.

Powell’s portrayal of herself and her marriage aims to be complex, but it’s just perplexing. Her husband knows of her affair, but it’s never really discussed. She never really expresses guilt; she actually rubs her husband’s nose in it; bruises from D. cover her body and e-mails and “sexts” are left in plain view. When Eric begins an affair of his own, Powell seems happy for him. Despite all of this neither considers divorce. A divorce, Powell explains, is not a “clean break” like cracking open a joint with one “delicious pop.” It’s more like snapping a bone, which requires hacking, sawing, and destroying. I’d argue that a divorce couldn’t be any worse than what she’s already done to her marriage, but that’s just my opinion.

Powell is defined by the men in her life; she lets them shape and mold her into different women, whichever fits their needs. With Eric she is the asexual wife; cuddling, drinking wine in front of the television and making dinner together is enough and supposedly illustrates their intimacy. With D., she is the sex kitten, wanting to be taken, more than happy to submit to him and his every whim.

Powell wants to have her meat and eat it too, and for some reason, the people in her world allow her to carry on like this while remaining in her life. I’ll never know who the real Julie Powell is, but if she’s anything like the character in Cleaving, I wish her luck and something in the way of self-esteem.

Review by Tina Vasquez
Profile Image for Heather.
822 reviews32 followers
January 4, 2010
this book made me furious. i read julie & julia and liked it well enough, although i felt like there was no strong resolution of the narrative like you need - even in a memoir. then i saw the movie and like most people thought meryl streep was amazing and julie was eh.

after some thought i decided this was because julie powell is fundamentally a little bit unlikeable. i think they cast perky amy adams in it to try to counter that quality she has, but to no avail. she's just got enough of a whiny, gloomy gus, debby downer type personality to kind of make you start getting a little annoying/you lose some sympathy for her in julie & julia without making you enraged. in the movie, unfortunately, those negative parts of her are more pronounced.

then you read cleaving and you want to kill her. cleaving, it turns out, is all about A. her boring obsession with butchery (oh, can you go on for pages about how to break down the boring muscle of the i don't care animal? great. thanks.), and more importantly B. a several-year-long affair she had while married to Eric, the be-saintedly sweet husband she talks about being sweet and supportive and tolerant all the time in J&J.

Turns out that's not enough for her, and she thought it would be fun to fuck some other guy behind his back. And then he found out about it - AND DIDN'T LEAVE HER. AND SHE KEPT DOING IT. FOR A LONG, LONG TIME.

Now I know that there are gray areas in the world and that I am clearly prone to seeing this in black and white. I have never met either of them. Eric could be a pain in the ass. But from what I am given to go on by the author herself, he is nothing but a nice guy. And for whatever reasons (it appears, although she doesn't dwell much on it, that this woman has a little of more deep-seated issues that are manifesting - she also clearly has a bit of an alcohol problem, so really what are all these acting out behaviors stemming from) she chooses to shit all over him.

What's worse, the guy she cheats with then smartens up that she's a psycho (it seems) and ditches. And she spends the entire book pining for him. In no uncertain terms. And by that I mean in slightly jarring, 'Damien, I wish you could fuck my pussy,' terms, which are quite a break from the rest of her writing style.

What's worse x 10000000 is that Eric will have to read this. All this pining. All the details of her clandestine affair that was going on behind his back. All the pining for this other guy that wasn't him. All the boring avoiding his texts/dull letters she could barely work up the energy to send to her husband while working herself into a frenzy over this other douche.

As a woman married to a very very nice man, obviously I am going to have very strong feelings about this. Because to me, dicking over a guy like Eric seems to me like dicking over my sweet husband, and some of my very sweet male friends. These are people who clearly do not deserve it. That she dicked him over may in fact be partly a reaction to his niceness (she needs more spice? He is boring/annoying?), but I don't care. It's just painful.

In short (ha), she makes herself into the most unsympathetic of narrators. In some ways, one could argue this is ballsy - she has to know that isn't painting a very flattering portrait of herself and that the reader is quickly not going to take her side/feel empathy for her. It could be construed as brave that she is owning these unflattering feelings (for a man who ignores her in lieu of the husband who loves her) and unflattering actions (that she is stabbing the nice husband in the back, and spending months debasing and humiliating herself by just not taking the hint and sending unanswered email after unanswered email to the guy she cheated with - lady, get the picture, he's done, you are psycho/annoying/embarrassing the shit out of yourself).

But I don't think she's doing it for that reason. Mostly because she spends the bulk of the book yammering in aforementioned boring detail about the butchery and very little (albeit a potent little) about the affair/marriage issues. That she escaped into the world of butchery to escape this mess her personal life has become I get, but the narrative connection between these two things is thin - to say the least.

After spending 4/5 of the book being absolutely furious with her, I finally got to the part where she started to travel (after months of hiding from Eric by renting a place in buttfuck by the butcher shop, she went home only to run away from him again to travel to South America, Africa, Urkaine and Japan). At that point, the book actually got interesting because she actually started to grow. Shocker.

By the time she was nearly raped by some shithead in Africa I actually had developed some empathy for her. Which was surprising. This tells me that at least by the time she did the traveling (and probably as a result of the traveling) she finally started to change. So at least this book has the effect in the end of her growing/changing that didn't really seem to happen in Julia & Julia.

I mean, big surprise, you travel and it changes you and you grow. Not exactly new, but at least it was interesting. Also interesting: Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love) - who wrote a blurb for the back of this book, btw - writes about how she was miserable in her marriage, met another man, and ultimately traveled to get over the both of them. Somehow she manages to do it in a way that doesn't make me hate her. She opens her book basically saying, he wasn't perfect, I wasn't perfect, and the details of those parts will stay with us. But no matter what I couldn't deny any longer that I was miserable. You know what? I can get behind that. She is honest, she accepts the gray area, and then you can go with her on her journey. I get that Julie Powell's examination was different. Hers was much more about the marriage dissolution/affair/etc. itself, which had the effect of making you like her less. That fact that the work she did to try to move on was less interesting than Gilbert's didn't help, either. Either way, it's just annoying.

I just wish her husband would wise up and get the funk out. And find another woman who appreciated him instead of treated him so foul-y. And that Julie Powell uses some of her book money for some seriously needed therapy. Jesus.
Profile Image for Pumpkin+Bear.
172 reviews13 followers
January 29, 2010
The scene in which Julie has a quickie against a wall with a stranger, and does not even enjoy it, is where I began to skim.

I can't decide if I'm sad for Powell or angry with her. Did she intend for me to like her bumbling, intent self in Julie and Julia, and to develop a little crush on her bumbling, loyal puppydog husband Eric, only to crap all over all that in this book? Or did her life really go all the way to hell so that she actually thinks this is a good book to write?

The thing is, there's probably a pretty good book about butchery in there somewhere. If you take out the "I just HAVE to follow my DREAMS!" crap and admit that learning butchery could be a great book, that would already start out with more integrity. If you don't throw in all kinds of heavy-handed metaphors to attempt to justify a really skanky affair that you don't even have the moral soundness to feel bad about, that would be nice, too. Actually, don't write about the affair at all, not the nasty, overwritten (and not that appealing) sex bits, not your Swim Fan behavior, not the really pathetic interactions with your husband--you guys don't even talk about the affair you both know is going on? How is that love? That's not even the opposite of love, it's just...nothing. And don't travel all around the world feeling awesome when you get harrassed by guys because everyone knows that Americans are sluts--travel around America, if you must, and visit other small-town butchers or something.

Anyway, this book made me feel gross--gross about butchery (when I bet I could have actually been drawn into an appealingly-written book about butchery), gross about Julie Powell, and kind of gross about myself.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
Profile Image for Alena Guggemos.
26 reviews15 followers
May 27, 2010
This is the problem with getting most of my books from the library. I walk in without a specific book in mind, browse around, think "why not?" and end up with a disaster.

I'm not a huge fan of Julie Powell anyway. So, she cooked her way through a cookbook. So, since when is that remarkable? There was a time, in our not-too-distant past, when folks used cookbooks on a regular basis. This was considered normal.

BUT. This is neither here nor there.

I had some hopes for "Cleaving" because I thought it might be interesting to learn more about butchering and the process of learning to butcher. If this book had been about that alone it would have fared much better. However, we are instead treated to a detailed account of Julie Powell's despicable personal life. Have you ever met someone and within 10 minutes knew - just KNEW - that s/he was a horrible person? Julie Powell, as she's presented herself in this book, is a horrible person, in a horrible marriage, experiencing a wave of seemingly undeserved amazing opportunities.

One star because now I know how to break down a beef shoulder.
Profile Image for christa.
745 reviews339 followers
December 22, 2009
When we last saw that saucy Julie Powell, she was a sweaty rosacea mess of marrow-crusted fingernails and damn-near oozing butter from her pores, at the finish line of a year-long Julia Childs' marathon fraught with self flagellation, hard liquor, and "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" quotations.

"Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat, and Obsession," is what happened after the book deal and the movie deal: More restlessness, in the key of the restlessness that prompted her first project-turned-blog-turned-book "Julie & Julia." Our spirited heroine is back -- and she's gotten naughty.

Julie has decided she wants to learn to be a butcher. She is absorbed into the staff at a hippie meat market in the Catskills. While Powell genuinely wants to learn the art of hacking through rib cages, and slicing pig cheeks, she also needs a distraction from that brain-worming sexual contortionist D -- her not-so covert alternative to her husband Eric.

Oh, Eric knows all about this D character. The dynamic Powell duo has been together so long that they sometimes wake with the same song in their head, Julie says. Not to mention that he has seen the text messages and emails. And so Eric had taken on his own side project, albeit reluctantly. The madcap swingers continue about their normal lives, sometimes coming home, sometimes staying out all night, never really talking about things -- things like how Julie likes it when D ties her up and smacks her around a bit.

By the time Julie ends up at Fleisher's wielding a meat cleaver, D has broken things off again, won't respond to her multiple and varied attempts at communication, and she is awash in passionate memories of the time she was tied to this or that, kissing in cabs, his smell, and other scenes from break-up montages.

Powell has two stories going on here, with opposite results:

1. There is a first-person journalistic account of learning how to be a butcher. This is amazingly visual and captivating. A mix of Susan Orlean-style reporting on a specialty or subculture that is made interesting by the way it is written more than, necessarily, the subject matter.

2. This is paired with doses of sloppy, overwrought puppy journal entries by someone who has obviously never skimmed "He's Just Not That Into You." This part is deeply confessional, like blog posts written in 2004 before people realized their bondage fantasies weren't necessarily as anonymous as they had hoped.

Powell obviously knows how to write, but it's also obvious that she learned to write at the school of blogger.com. She addresses the reader, inserts pop culture references -- almost exclusively from "Buffy," and sometimes slips in little conversational quips and ticks. ("I know, right?")

In the latter part of the book, she goes on a meat pilgrimage to Argentina and Tanzania. She writes these colorful bits about drinking fresh animal blood, wearing jewelry made from skin, bits of fur still poking out of it. She watches slaughters and meets a man who thinks a beer and a cigarette is a fair trade for attempted rape and her Blackberry. It's only when she goes back into her own head to her two loves that it unfavorably twiddles the uvula.

In post-publication interviews, Powell has indicated that she would like to try writing straight-up fiction. If her first two books are indication, she should do the exact opposite. Embedded journalism, told in third person: sheep herding, organic farming, ride with Hells Angels. She cannot be trusted to write fiction. It will be thinly-veiled. It will be overwrought. It will be dated. It will have a wine bottle on the cover and lipstick-scrawl font. It will be a waste.

Profile Image for Lisa.
2,042 reviews
January 4, 2010
I'll give Julie Powell one thing: She's brave. She's incredibly flawed and puts everything out there in this book. And I do mean everything. I guess there's such a thing as airing too much of your dirty laundry! I won't be spoiling anything by telling you this, since it's all revealed early in the book, but Julie -- who wrote lovingly about her marriage in her first book, Julie & Julia, does an abrupt about face in this book. It's a real shocker, this one. After she got famous, her life fell apart. She started a two-year affair, and her husband Eric found out about it two months in and carried on his own affair.

The thing is, from what Julie said in her last book and even what she says in this one, it's clear that she and Eric are a great match. Yet she's drawn to her lover, D., who's also clearly an asshole. She stalks him and stuff. If you thought it was brave to talk about having sex with strangers (which she also does) and drink a lot (she does that too), you'll really be shocked when Julie reveals one aspect of her relationship with D. I'll leave that part for you to discover, if you dare.

Oh, and this book is also about meat. Julie is an apprentice at a butcher shop for six months and goes into graphic detail -- of course -- about that. So if you're a vegetarian, you won't want to read this book. Even if you like to eat meat, it might make you a bit squeamish. After her apprenticeship is up, she takes a sabbatical to Argentina, Ukraine and Tazmania to learn more about meat, because she's still running away from home. And at the end, her marriage vows are not completely intact. That's what bothers me the most, I think. Do they not count for anything anymore?! This book just made me realize that I don't really like Julie Powell that much.



Profile Image for Irena Smith.
Author 1 book34 followers
December 3, 2012
I have one word to say about this book: TMI. Picked it up because I was absolutely charmed by Julie's spontaneous, totally profane, utterly engaging voice and madcap humor (and indifferent attention to, um, kitchen cleanliness) in Julie & Julia. I was hoping to find more of the same in Cleaving, but nooooo.... apparently, such is the sense of false intimacy fostered by blogs that in this book Julie decides we want to know EVERYTHING about her personal life. Not just the cooking, not just the butchering, but the really sordid details of let's-do-it-standing-up-in-the-apartment-building-lobby-with-a-guy-I-don't-really-love-but-can't-keep-my-hands-off sex. Did I really need to know that? No, I did not. Do I feel horrible for poor Eric, who I presume did not ask to be written about and exposed to the world as the wounded cheated-upon husband? Yes, I do. How's this going to play out years from now, I wonder? When there are kids, or a new relationship, or just a transition to a time of life when one does not so much wish to be reminded of the "let's-do-it-standing-up-etc." sex?

Happily, I can say "Not my problem." (Aside from wanting to take a shower a third of the way through the book, which I skimmed but didn't have the stomach to finish.) Sadly, Julie apparently has not learned that important lesson that all writers have to learn one day: there's writing for public consumption, and then there's stuff you write and hide in your desk drawer. In the olden days, people -- discreet people, people with a sense of dignity -- burned that kind of writing in the fireplace. These days, we have the luxury of the "delete" key. Why it wasn't used more here is the big question.
Profile Image for Leeanna.
538 reviews96 followers
January 24, 2010
Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat, and Obsession, by Julie Powell

Julie Powell's penchant for whining carries from her previous novel into "Cleaving." While reading the book, I actually felt very bogged down and depressed, especially after seeing page after page of her whining about her troubled marriage and pathetic affair. I call her affair pathetic because even after it's clear the other man doesn't want her, she stalks him, writes to him, texts him, and doesn't give up for two years (and the reader gets to hear about it *every* time she tries to contact him). Perhaps writing "Cleaving" was a form of therapy for Powell, but it's the sort of writing that should stay in a blog or diary, not in a book.

I wanted to like this book. After not particularly enjoying Powell's first novel, "Julie and Julia," I had hoped that she would show something worthy of having published a second book. But "Cleaving" fell flat for me, like an unsharpened knife slicing into bread. The main subject, butchering, is only somewhat interesting, and I think the reader is overdosed on descriptions and techniques on how to break up this animal, or how to cut down that animal. My eyes started glazing over after the fifth or sixth long passage of yet another butchering story.

I had read the prologue of "Cleaving" in my copy of "Julie and Julia," and it caught my attention, but for me that was probably the best part of the book. The other employees at Fleisher's are far more interesting than Powell herself, and I did enjoy reading her stories about them. However her trips to different countries are recounted in a so-so manner, including way too many experiences of men finding her attractive. Do I really need to hear that a Maasai warrior finds her pretty, after hearing that Ukrainian and Argentinian men do as well?

If I were her, I certainly wouldn't want such details of my life spewed on a page, published for anyone and everyone to read. But I suppose it does take guts to publicly talk about an affair, her marriage troubles, her husband's lover, anonymous sex, etc., and her use of butchering as a way to find herself. I'm just not sure if it's good literary material; the liberal sprinkling of Buffy metaphors certainly doesn't help.

I'd say get "Cleaving" out from the library if you're determined to read it, before parting with your money.

1/5.
Profile Image for Shelah.
171 reviews33 followers
January 6, 2010
Remember Julie Powell? Cute, sweet, Julie Powell so adorably portrayed by Amy Adams in the film Julie and Julia? Well, that Julie Powell and the one in Cleaving bear only a couple of resemblances: the hangdog husband Eric, and an annoying tendency to whine. In Bad Mother, Ayelet Waldman talks about how people with bipolar disorder make the best memoirists because they tend to overshare-- to lack the inhibition that makes most people stop talking about the most intimate details of their lives. While Julie Powell only hints at her psychological difficulties (quite possibly the only thing she only hints at), she definitely falls into the category of oversharing. Big time.

When I read on the book's jacket that she was caught between her faithful husband and a lover, I thought the lover must have been a lover in a metaphorical sense. But no, Cleaving is the story of how Powell makes herself miserable over the course of the three or four years after the end of Julie and Julia, carrying on an extended affair with the man she cheated on Eric with back in college, a man who indulges her S&M fantasies (yes, I'm serious). While the personal stories are squirm-worthy and almost too salacious to be believed, she mixes them in with the story of her butchering apprenticeship, which I actually sort of loved. I learned a lot about how meat goes from squealing to sausage, and I think she did a pretty good job of using metaphors between butchering pigs and cows and the butchering she was doing to her marriage.

You've got to admire someone who isn't afraid to come across as pretty despicable, as Julie does in Cleaving. But honestly, I was riveted. I could not stop reading the book. But if it had been my life (which I cannot even fathom), I would have changed the names and the places and called the thing a novel.
19 reviews1 follower
September 6, 2012
Raw and Oddly Engaging...

So many people have reviewed this book and thought it was horrid. I have an alternative perspective and it's actually a book I have read several times (I like Julie & Julia too, but this book is not in the same vein, so if you are looking for the Julie in that book, she's not here in Cleaving).

Perhaps on purpose (and I may be giving too much credit to the author & editors), but this book is very raw. It's about butchering, yes, but the storyline offers a look at emotions that are unedited. This isn't a story that is light-hearted or amended for the feelings of others. It's true to heart, and whether you like what's in that heart or not, the author is perfectly candid.

I think I like this book (as most books I truly enjoy) for the way that you feel when you read it - you become immersed in the constancy of the butchering process - similar to cooking; it's methodical and once engrossed, you can forget about all the other things in your life you wanted but never did, or wished you didn't feel, but do anyways. There is an evolution of character between the Julie in Julie & Julia and the Julie in Cleaving. I think it's true to what the story is about - her life, how she feels, and the raw constancy of her emotional adventures.

It takes something unique to be able to drop your mask and show the world your own self; especially through prose where you have at every turn the opportunity to edit and censor endlessly. Whether you think she is right or wrong in her actions told through this book, she doesn't censor herself (either via action or thoughts) so she essentially offers you (the reader) her raw self to be judged, loved, or hated. And I, perhaps unjustly so, find it oddly engaging because of it.
Profile Image for edh.
179 reviews9 followers
December 11, 2009
Julie Powell is back... and this time she's chucked Mastering the Art of French Cooking in favor of extracting the internal organs of various animals. Don't forget, she's also cheating on her husband and obsessing about entrails. There's just no end to her versatility - in one book she's a spunky gal downtrodden by a dead-end job but nurturing her soul through food (Julie & Julia) and in the next, she's cleaving a pig head in two with a skil-saw before having gross anonymous sex in a hallway with a stranger and mourning the imminent demise of her marriage while drinking herself to sleep.

This book read like a defiant toddler's response to the image Powell herself created in her first memoir. It's the literary equivalent of a bad breakup haircut - you know you don't really want hot pink highlights, but it's going to prove that you're AWESOME and BOLD and INDEPENDENT MINDED and TOTALLY FREE TO DO WHATEVER YOU WANT. Beyond the thematic craziness, the pacing was lousy. We spend the first 7/8th of the book following New Badass Julie as she becomes an apprentice butcher worshiping at the altar of meat, then we careen around the world with her as she travels to famous places where she eats supposedly amazing boutique meats and decides what she wants to do with her life, her career, and her marriage. It's just too bad that by that point, caring about Julie has become as tough as a mouthful of badly cut non-organic factory-farmed chicken.
Profile Image for Happyreader.
544 reviews102 followers
December 21, 2009
At the end, I was so bored with the book that I skimmed all of her travels and read the end to see how she wrapped things up and called it a day. Who knew that obsession and kinky sex could eventually become so tiresome? I enjoyed her butcher shop apprenticeship but the meat saga also became tiresome once she traveled abroad since she primarily observed. Plus I was waiting for some epiphany that never came. Still self-absorbed and Buffy-obsessed at the end, just more resigned to her fate.
Profile Image for Kari.
362 reviews10 followers
December 9, 2009
Julie Powell is an engaging writer. But Julie Powell should never again write about herself.

Julie Powell of Julie & Julia fame has written the second installment in her culinary journey, Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat, and Obsession. Despite the success of her first novel, Julie is still having a crisis of self, this time one that involves an affair with a long-time acquaintance, a person we know only as 'D'. Rather than using food as a means to self-discovery, this time Julie uses food as an escape as she takes on an apprenticeship at a butcher in upstate New York, followed by a meat tour (traveled solo, of course) of Argentina, Ukraine, and Tanzania.

Where do I start with the reasons I wanted to throw this book across the room every 20 or so pages? I'll start with a more literary analysis:

This book had no arc. In Julie & Julia, we knew why she was embarking on the project—bored with dead-end jobs and stuck in a rut, she's trying to spice up her life with a project. In the introduction of Cleaving, Julie tells us she has no idea why she is doing this. What is driving her to become a butcher? She doesn't know, so the reader doesn't know, and we still don't know by the end. The premise seems forced by an editor or publisher as a follow-up to a wildly successful first novel.

That's all I've got in terms of "literary criticism." Now it's just going to get personal. I don't like Julie Powell. My general rule of life is to not compare an author's works to each other, but I am taking exception to my own rule. I enjoyed Powell's voice in Julie & Julia. She was snarky, sarcastic, and though a bit self-involved, I tended to look past that because I understand the manic emotions that come with a quarter-life crisis. Well now she has taken self-involved to a whole new level. In both books, she goes on and on about her wonderful husband, Eric. They're soulmates, they understand each other, they're practically the same person, yada yada. But she's having an affair with an old friend they both know...for over two years...and Eric knows about it...and she knows he knows but keeps doing it...and he stays with her! Grow some balls, dude! When the affair is finally over and 'D' ignores Julie, she becomes that girl. You know the one—clingy, needy, and whiny as she obsessively stalks him. And I mean literally stalks, sending him emails, texts, and gifts for months after they've ceased reciprocal communication. Everything she sees or hears or experiences somehow reminds her of D, and even a year later, she sends him a letters alongside the ones to Eric as she's traveling across the world. It's been a year! Get over it, because I'm sick of hearing about it. I could care less about cooking, but unlike her last book, I preferred the passages about food this time around.

Julie is brutally honest, and while I usually appreciate that in a memoir, in this case, that may be where I find fault. The most disgusting part of it, to me, is how she is revealing this intimate situation in graphic detail at the expense of the people she supposedly loves...all for a paycheck. These people are real. Everyone that Eric meets in the future can read the gruesome details of his marriage and judge him for his wife's words. He's going to look like a chump because she wanted a book deal. There's honest and then there's just plain cruel. Get over yourself, Julie Powell. Think about how something like this is going to affect other people. You have skill but start writing commentary for something, because I don't care about your train wreck of a life anymore. She does a good job weaving together the different aspects of the story, and some may be able to look past her personality to find the story "real" and entertaining, but the best part of this book to me was the cover art.

And for the love of god, stop with the Buffy quotes and references! As a Buffy aficionado, I am taking offense to the excessive reiteration that you're a fan of a cult show.
4 reviews
December 10, 2009
I found this book kind of disgusting, and it had nothing to do with the meat parts. (I actually really liked the meat parts, and have been craving liver ever since I finished it.)

It's hard for me to read this book objectively, as I'm getting married in less than a year, and the meaning of marriage and marriage vows is on my mind a lot lately. I don't like to hear about other people's marriages falling apart, or about people breaking their marriage vows, because I really want my marriage to work, and I really want marriage in general to work. I want it to be sacred. I want people to keep their marriage vows, and if they don't, I want them to either regret it and vow to do better, or to stop being married. Julie Powell does neither of these things.

In this book, Powell is willing neither to give up her exciting, sexy lover (even when he makes it abundantly clear that he's not into her, anymore), nor to end things with her husband. He's not willing to force things, either, even though he's not happy, and so the bulk of this book is about a kind of miserable stasis of selfish indecision, almost as painful to read about as it must have been to experience.

Even more frustrating is that Powell doesn't reach any sort of conclusion about her marriage or anything else in this book, though she seems to think she has. Towards the end, she tries to force a realization by recounting a conversation with her husband that basically amounts to them agreeing to "wait and see." What she doesn't seem to realize is that's what's been happening for the entire duration of the book, so when this revelation comes, it's a real let-down.

The only clear conclusion Powell comes to in this book is that she likes butchery. Her clarity on this subject may account for the passages on cutting up animals being the most satisfying in the book. Powell's writing skills have improved a lot, I feel, since Julia & Julia, and these passages are delicious to read, but her attempts to draw parallels between butchery and her romantic life seem forced, and a little clumsy at times. I also really enjoy the way she chose to include recipes. It's a clever device, and works much better at creating interesting interludes in the story than her awkward, presumptuous passages from Julia Child's POV did in her previous book.

In the end, I realized I wanted to read this book not so much because I liked Julie & Julia, but because I liked Julie Powell, and I was disappointed because I really don't like her, anymore. Powell's voice in her first book was sardonic, yet hopeful, equally astonished and delighted by the success of her writing/cooking project. She was witty as well as humble, and I was excited to see what she would come out with next.

In this book, Powell has lost her likability. Her voice is that of a person who has completely bought into her own hype, and feels entitled to do whatever she wants, no matter how it may hurt those around her. She seems infatuated with herself and her own drama, and so thinks everyone else must be as well. She's also lost her sense of self-awareness, and her frequent attempts a self-deprecation ring utterly false. She doesn't regret what she's done, and hasn't learned or grown from it at all. The only thing she knows for certain is that she likes to cut up meat, and in the end, that knowledge is all the reader gains from this book.

I'm sure Powell was under a lot of pressure to put out a second book after the release of the film version of Julie & Julia, but I really wish she had waited until she had something to say before writing Cleaving. I think this story would have benefited a great deal from some additional perspective.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
Profile Image for Kira Flowerchild.
654 reviews
January 29, 2024
A lot of people hated this book, and I think much of that had to do with unmet expectations. After reading Julie and Julia, and after seeing the movie starring Amy Adams, who is, as another reviewer said, sunshine personified, people expected this new book, basically The Further Adventures of Julie Sans Julia, to be a continuation of the Nora Ephron-ized movie version of Julie Powell's life.

The fact is, Julie Powell isn't Amy Adams. She also isn't the relatively one-dimensional character she portrayed herself as in Julie & Julia. I'm glad I reread Julie & Julia immediately before reading this book. It gave me a basis to compare the two books and the woman portrayed in both. Cleaving, which by the way is the perfect title because, according to dictionary.com, it can mean both "to cling to" and "to split or divide," describes Julie Powell's life perfectly. Both those meanings are prominent themes in this book.

I will admit that I skimmed a lot of the extreme detail about butchering. I'm not squeamish, it's just that I'm not terribly interested in the subject. People who gave this book one star - and 46% of Amazon readers did - weren't paying attention. They were judging the book on the basis of Julie Powell's life choices, which admittedly were questionable. The writing itself was, in many cases, actually better than that of her first book.

Julie's relationships with all the men in her life (husband and lover) are problematic. She describes her husband and herself as "the same person." Not healthy. She has a fixation on her lover, almost an addiction. She feeds the addiction by constantly texting, emailing, and calling him, even a year after he has quit responding. Most women would have more self-esteem or pride than that. Not Julie.



One thing I wondered about throughout the entire book is how Julie's husband and lover felt about her describing the most intimate details of their lives and relationships. I also wondered if it was cathartic for her to admit all her mistakes and all the bad choices she had made. I guess it takes a certain kind of person to be willing to lay their life out bare for all the world to see.
Profile Image for Carin.
Author 1 book117 followers
October 22, 2009
It has been a long time since I read Julie & Julia (although I saw the movie much more recently). I was confused about people who'd read the book more recently talking about how Julie was unlikable. But I can get that. I don't readmemoirs about people I want to be friends with - I'm fine with them being slightly unpleasant since I won't have to deal with them once I'm done with the book. Ms. Powell is very self-centered, obsessive, and it's uncomofrtable watching how she hurts her husband and herself without seemingly being able to control it. I am very glad for both their sakes that she did find butchering as it does seem to help her focus and also get out of her own head. The lover, D, didn't ever really gel for me as a unique character, but that's okay as he honestly really doesn't need to. He's "the other man" and no amount of protesting and defensiveness on Ms. Powell's part will change that. But that's fine. She's a good writer and you certainly feel all the hurt, anger, confusion, and at the butcher shop you feel the comraderie, the interest, and even the relaxation that the tasks bring into her life. The last little bit of the book when she's travelling felt a bit like Eat Pray Love, but I can see that even though she's finished her butchery apprenticeship, she wasn't fully recouperated from the affair and she needed to get away. I am very glad she didn't make that part bigger. Structurally it might seem uneven, but it really worked for me.
Profile Image for Bookmarks Magazine.
2,042 reviews777 followers
February 8, 2010
So if you enjoyed Julie & Julia, you shouldn't spoil that experience by reading this book--or even the rest of this review. Cleaving aspires to boldly lay bare the inner workings of a global industry and an intimate relationship, but it falls short in both spheres. Though Powell is at her best when writing about meat, these sections are too few--and too graphic--to sustain the story. "The squeamish--morally and otherwise--should read elsewhere," advises the New York Times Book Review. Powell's explicit account of her kinky affair with D. alternately bored and repelled critics, as did her smug attitude, recklessly self-destructive behavior, and spitefulness toward her beleaguered husband. Unfortunately, Powell's second memoir appears to have been churned out to please a pushy publisher rather than readers in general--a recipe for disaster--and its considerable flaws overshadow her intriguing view from the butcher's counter. This is an excerpt from a review published in Bookmarks magazine.
Profile Image for Jennifer.
42 reviews6 followers
May 4, 2018
I hated this book and loved it at the same time. The writing was good and her life a disaster. It was more about her interpersonal journey than meat cutting. I cannot help but think of how mortified her husband was when and if he read her memoir.
Profile Image for Geraldine.
179 reviews6 followers
December 16, 2009
I love books. I love food. I love books about food. I even liked "Julie and Julia" very much, because the author was so darn likeable. But "Cleaving" is awful. Maybe I have less sympathy for a rich authoress who is cheating on her nice husband than I did when she was a struggling temp who just loved Julia Child. Maybe it was the endless meat/sex metaphor, because ten thousand pages of THAT won't get old. Maybe it was the racist travel-to-find-myself plot (actual last line for a chapter: "I pin my hopes on Africa.") MAYBE IT WAS THE ENDLESS USE OF THE BLACKBERRY AS A PLOT DEVICE. Not even Meryl could save this one.
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