What do you do when you’re a blogger with a book deal and the book’s already come out? Julie Powell, whose Salon blog “The Julie/Julia Project” morphed into Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen, has started a new blog. She’s extremely modest about the new site’s goals, namely “just keeping folks in the loop” about how the book’s doing, but the real fun may come from watching her increasingly cranky reactions as the reviews start coming in.
It all started off well enough when Gabrielle Gershenson told SF Chronicle readers the book doesn’t quite transcend its online origins. In response, Powell blogs that the review is “less than glowing, but sort of a relief.” But then David Kamp begins his NYTBR review by describing the original project as “one of the best ideas yet hatched in the still-young history of blogging,” and adds that “Powell shows signs of being one of our better, loopier culinary thinkers.” You’d think that would make any author happy–yet his accompanying criticisms (“too much blog in its DNA”) inspire Powell to dismiss the entire article as “thoroughly bitchy.” After that, Max Withers has much harsher things to say for the LA Times, and Powell decides “men, as a race, excluding one, are just a bunch of fucking assholes.”
I’ll be taking odds now not just on which of the daily Times reviewers will write about Julie and Julia–William Grimes because it’s for foodies, or Janet Maslin because it’s light and fluffy–but what new levels of invective Powell will unleash when it comes out…