Cleaving

I knew when Julie Powell admitted at the beginning of her new book, Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat, and Obsession, that she had been having an affair, that my admiration and adoration for her would be tested. I loved her book Julie & Julia, but my feelings for her have soured after finishing her latest book. However, I tried to set my personal feelings aside and focus on the story for its own merits. In a nutshell, shortly after Julie & Julia was published, some old boyfriend looked her up and they began having an affair. She becomes obsessed with this guy. In a freaky stalker-ish sort of way. Her husband finds out about it, but she continues the affair. For whatever reason, she decides that becoming a butcher will help her deal with her issues, so she takes an apprenticeship in a butcher's shop a few hours outside of New York. After the apprenticeship is over, she still hasn't resolved her issues, so she decides to travel. Argentina, Ukraine, Tanzania, Japan.

The butchery aspect of the story was interesting. It's a little gruesome, but interesting if you really want to know where different cuts of meat come from, how animals are broken down, what it's like to work in a butcher shop, etc. How butchery is a metaphor for marriage, I'm still not clear. Her trip to Argentina was also interesting. Seeing how cows are bought and sold fit well with the meat theme. The rest of her trips, while interesting, didn't seem to fit with the theme as well. I started getting this Eat, Pray, Love feeling, I'm sorry to say. (Woman with love issues, who doesn't have to worry about a 9 to 5 job, decides she's just going to take an extended vacation from life and then throw it all together in a book.) Some people enjoy these types of memoirs, but they aren't for me. I eventually started skimming over the obsessive musings and reading only the parts about meat. It feels very disjointed, and the interesting bits are constantly interrupted with her obsessive relationship, freaky sex, and self-loathing. Save that crap for your therapist and give me more food! Had she focused just on the butchery, or just on the travel, I think she would have had a much better book. Unfortunately, this is not a book I will be recommending to people.