I've just finished reading My Life In France by Julia Child and Alex Prud'Homme and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Julia was, I suppose, a rather late bloomer and this story of her life in France and how she discovered her passion is fascinating. Julia's voice comes through nicely, the same voice that one finds in her cookbooks, although the book is about far more than food and cooking, and it is partly this voice that keeps the book so enthralling. The book was pieced together from conversations with Julia, and this conversational quality is one of its strong points. The book is both rambling and focused, both qualities of Julia Child that I recall from her PBS cooking shows. Julia doesn't necessarily always bother to translate, just as one would not if one were sitting down and chatting, and in the cadence of the words one can imagine the voice, methodical and practical but also filled with passion, emotion, and memory. I'm surprised this languished unread on my shelf for so long.
During the early days of Julia's stay in France, she and her husband were acquainted with Hadley Mowrer, the former Mrs. Hemingway. This reminded me that I had recently read The Paris Wife, the novel based on the marriage between Ernest Hemingway and Hadley Richardson (later Mowrer). Julia points out that Hadley was not particularly intellectual or sophisticated, which is also obviously played up in the novel. The novel had been enjoyable enough but ultimately fell flat. It seemed obvious, and this may have been the case, that both parties may have truly been in love, but they also married idealized versions of themselves, each of them looking for something or someone to fill a void they felt within themselves. Their relationship never developed beyond this phase and of course failed because grand illusion can never be sustained indefinitely. Hadley seems to have had no passion of her own, no interests other than being Mrs. Ernest Hemingway, as if she hoped he would fill her up and be her passion. But of course Hemingway had his own devils and certainly couldn't sustain himself, much less someone else. The crumbling of the illusion was obvious long before the end of the book. I have to say however that I am now interested in reading a little more about Hemingway, a subject that held little interest before reading this novel.
Somewhere between the above two books I read The Churchills: In Love and War. I can merely say it was okay in a big curl up in the armchair with a glass of wine and indulge in a bit of gossip kind of way. It was fairly quick to read, and offered very little of substance, and was basically an entertaining bit of fluff. I'm certainly not above a bit of fluff here and there, and the book did round out my mental images of a few people who, heretofore, had been vague names on the pages of multiple books and histories.
