Chapter One Hundred Fifty-One: My Life in France

In this autobiography by well-known chef Julia Child, she recounts how she came to learn and love cooking from her first stay in France in the late 1940s and 1950s and how she turned what started as a personal interest in cooking into a successful career as a cookbook writer and television chef.  Child also includes numerous details of her daily life (along with her husband and helper Paul) in France, Germany, Norway, and the U.S. through the early 1990s.  There are also hearty helpings of her political leanings and the tensions these caused with her father, as well as her views on American and French culture, though the focus of the book always remains on cooking and food.  By her account in My Life in France (co-written with a grand-nephew), her life was generally a happy one, despite the stresses and strains that come along with celebrity, and she certainly led an interesting life as well.  Even as someone who is relatively uninterested in food and cooking, I found this a fascinating and cheerful account of an interesting life well lived, and I would certainly recommend it to readers interested in the cultures of France and the U.S. in the late twentieth century or in biographies of chefs, or of women, or in books about generally happy people.  

Coincidentally, I have recently encountered two other books that involve Julia Child, but neither made it onto this blog originally, as one is a picture book and the other I listened to as an audiobook.  But I heartily enjoyed both of them, and as they're on the same subject, I'd like to mention them here.  The first is Minette's Feast: The Delicious Story of Julia Child and her Cat by Susanna Reich, a really charming picture book mainly about Julia Child's cat, Minette (whom Child discusses in My Life in France).  If you want an adorable picture book about a happy cat, Minette's Feast is a great choice.  The second is Provence, 1970: M.F.K. Fisher, Julia Child, James Beard, and the Reinvention of American Taste by Luke Barr, which gives some context to Child's career and offers a wider perspective on some of the events mentioned in My Life in France.  A nonfiction book, it provides a history of the evolution of food culture in the U.S. of the late twentieth century.