An Experience Worth Savoring: Julia Child’s Life in France

By Breanne Boland May 18, 2006 Issue

At the core of My Life in France is what’s at the core of every good memoir: a life well lived. Often, celebrity “memoirs” are written (or ghostwritten) only because of the person’s notoriety, existing only to capitalize on the person’s probably fleeting fame. Even if the person’s life is fascinating, and even if they have a wonderful personality to go along with it, few people wait long enough to put their story to paper. This step is the most crucial, as it lets the story have its proper conclusion, and it lets the person gain the necessary distance to do such introspective work.

Fortunately, Julia Child satisfied each of these requirements, and so her memoir is a lovely one, successful as both a memoir of an extraordinary life, and as a revealing and illuminating book for her wide audience. She writes about her three loves—France, her husband, and cooking—and makes each so appealing that you become hungry for travel, people, and food in equal amounts.

Child came to her calling in her mid-30s, a bit later than most great success stories, and her fame came well after that. She didn’t learn to cook at all until after she was married at 34, and the book takes us through her education in French cooking, from the obtuse headmistress of the Cordon Bleu to the wide range of revered chefs who taught her lessons in the art she loved, one by one. With each experience, we see how she came to view cooking as she did, and how she achieved her success. It also makes her first great accomplishment, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, even more remarkable, as her education required such dedicated curiosity. The Cordon Bleu was not what it is today, and most of her education was hard-won. Her candor is most useful in this respect; while this is hardly a muckraking book, she doesn’t mince words about difficult people or situations.

Her story was pieced together wonderfully by Alex Prud’homme, her grandnephew, from a long series of interviews. His preservation of her inimitable voice is on par with Alex Haley’s work on The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Each sentence, especially those embellished with her exclamations (“What fun!” “What a tonic!”), is absolutely Julia Child, no less than if she were reading it out loud. She’s aided by a wealth of supporting materials: she, her husband, and both of their families were dedicated letter-writers, and her husband was a gifted photographer. As much as I love illustrations in books, I often find pictures in biographies to be redundant or lazy at best; at worst, they can just be filler. Instead, Paul Child’s photographs are perfectly complimentary to his wife’s recollections. They’re frequently beautiful, and are often a delight separately from the story, such as the two pages of annual Valentines the couple sent out, or her pages of typewritten and hand-corrected manuscripts for her cookbooks. Child and Prud’homme had an enormous amount of supporting material to work with, and what they chose unerringly fits the text, and complements it beautifully.

One recommendation—unless you have a good working knowledge of French, with a vocabulary concentrated in food and its preparation, you’d enjoy the book more if you had a French-English dictionary with you as you read. Child’s goal has always been clarity, rather than unnecessary simplicity; so while sometimes terms can be understood through context, that’s not always the case. It’s best that these phrases were left in French, as it sets the tone very well, especially when they’re living in Paris, and Child is submerged in a foreign culture as much as the reader. However, when she’s whizzing through the preparation of a meal, and two-thirds of the dish names are in italics, a bit of extra direction helps enormously.

The writing is marvelous, and the accompanying photographs enhance the text at all turns. However, the true pleasure of the book is hearing the life story of someone who truly, entirely enjoyed her life. Julia Child loved her husband, her profession, and the many places and people that formed her life, and she loved them without reservation. The book itself is a fine story, but it’s the satisfaction of reading about a profoundly satisfied woman that makes you smile once you turn the last page. By page numbers, it’s a fairly brief book, but like a well-prepared meal, its slim size doesn’t make it any less enjoyable.

My Life in France, by Julia Child with Alex Prud’homme, Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, 317 pages, available at libraries and bookstores.

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