I've always had a thing for Paris in the first half of the last century. I don't often think "I might have been happy there, then," but I think I might've.
I don't see why, in that case, I felt so unsure about reading Julia Child's My Life in France (Knopf, 2006). I bought it, but, as often, I thought I liked the idea of it better than I would like the reading. I'm blessed with a solution for these things: my mother reads so much, and so much more than I do, I get to read vicariously through her. Yet somehow on holiday, it felt right--comfy cozy--to pick it up again.
There's plenty about the book that has me impatient: It's under-edited. It leaves a lot of emotional dot dot dots where one of the things that makes me feel heavy is the holding of unsorted emotional baggage. This was especially true for me in Child's relationship with Simone Beck (was it ever ok again?). It also has little control of pace, something that's to me a near epidemic in contemporary publishing: where it starts very rich in the joys of the minute, it ends in a mad crush.
There's nonetheless much I'm taken by, starting with how much of Child's self in the cadence and feel of the prose--and what's there not to love? She knows herself well, body and soul. A woman well loved. A woman who loves intensely. Stubborn, even intransigent, but in the way I've often seen the genius mind to be, where total focus on a few realities is the only path to invention.
A few days ago I was walking and thinking about the thing I'm most grateful for in reading My Life in France: How it steeped me in this era of food when so much was new. A great deal of the memoir is about what's new to Julia, and how she brought her discoveries to the U.S. public. But then what actually stops me in my tracks is reading that this was a time where beurre blanc was merely a regional reality, one that Child was the first to formalise in print. Reading this small bit to be so makes me aware of time before our own in terms a food, and so momentous did I find this that it gave me a sense of time before time.
While thinking some of these things, I came across the storefront above, filled with all manner of copper that Child valued so well. All so new and sparkly, and full of promise somehow.