Claire Conger

“I don’t have time to be married!” wails Julie in Julie and Julia, a movie about Julia Child and devote Julie Powell. What Julie really should have cried, was “I don’t have time to work all day at my stupid government job!”

Screenwriter Nora Ephron, responsible for such romantic movies as Sleepless in Seattle and Bewitched, might be expected to emphasize the personal aspect of marriage over the sociopolitical context in which those marriages are stressed.

For Julie and Julia, Ephron blended Julie Powell’s Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously and Julia Child’s My Life in France, and parallels the lives of Powell, 30 something in the 2000s and played by Amy Adams, with Child, 40 something in the 1950s and played by Meryl Streep.

Both women searched for something to do and found it in cooking.

Julie, shamed by her peers’ professional successes and feeling aimless, creates a challenge for herself: Prepare the 524 recipes* in Julia Child’s Mastering The Art of French Cooking (1961), all in 365 days. She would document this effort in a blog, which is still available for viewing at The Julie/Julia Project on salon.com.

Julie chooses cooking because she finds it consoling to prepare something in the kitchen after an unhappy day at the office.

Julia, tagging along with her diplomatic corps husband who is stationed in Paris, needed some way to occupy her time. Enchanted by French food, she decides to take up cooking.

Julie, who melts into a sobbing child when things don’t go well, wants more from Julia than simply to learn to cook. She wants Julia’s daring and nonchalance.

Julia, with a husband who provides a good living and no children to occupy her time, has the means to pursue her interests.

Julie is stressed because she’s trying to live up to our ridiculous idea of success in 21st century America. Julia is nonchalant because she defies mid-twentieth-century expectations and she does it with leisure.

* The opening of Julie’s blog puts the number of recipes at 536.