Book 19: My Life In France by Julia Childs
My Life in France
Julia Child
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This is a funny sort of book to ead while one is on a reducing diet, but it's not so much about eating as about how to live your life with meaning when you don't have children. You have to have WORK. You have to have work you can do until you are quite old, work that you love, work that is of service to other people, and that has some sort of physical element that makes you interact with the outside world.
I also LOVE the marriage that Julia and Paul Childs had. When his career as a sort of diplomat / foreign service person waned, he did not crawl into his male ego and resent his successful wife. He supported her projects, he LOVED her projects, and enthusiastically participated in all of them by being the illustrator and photographer. Wonderful. This is the direct antidote to the "nevertheless Men are Necessary" type of book, which says that men in Paul's position will cheat on their wives and fall into alcoholism and gambling and then graduate to wife beating.
Also, this book is a study on jealousy - Simca's jealous of Julia. Simca doesn't and can't be the sort of personality that Julia is, and doesn't want to make the effort that Julia makes to learn the television trade and make something more of herself than just a niche cooking teacher, but she highly resents the fact that Julia gets attention and success that she herself does not have, and gets very passive aggressive and nuts. Because Julia is the undisputed winner (she starts out a winner because she doesn't compete with Simca to begin wth) she is very gracious about Simca, but it's astonishing how Simca, a 50 something french lady living half a century ago behaves exactly like some of the mad-with-jealousy behavior I see exhibited by Korean men and women in their 30s in the Compay. . Really, dysfunction and unhappiness is EXACTLY THE SAME It's happiness that's unique.
Julia Childs starts this book at 30something, and now that I'm thirty something I'm sort of like Hm! I need .. a plan. A childless and even husbandless middle and late age is something that must be planned for, and she is a super great role model for this, more than say, that perennial unmarried woman template, Coco Chanel, because really, Chanel wasn't really joie de vivre and positive, you know?