Meals author whose e-book impressed the film Julie & Julia useless at 49

Meals author Julie Powell, who turned an web darling after running a blog for a yr about making each recipe in Julia Kid’s Mastering the Artwork of French Cooking, resulting in a e-book deal and a movie adaptation, has died. She was 49.

Powell died of cardiac arrest on Oct. 26 at her dwelling in upstate New York, the New York Instances reported. Her loss of life was confirmed by Judy Clain, Powell’s editor, who can also be editor-in-chief of Little, Brown.

“She was an excellent author and a daring, unique particular person and she or he won’t be forgotten,” Clain stated in a press release. “We’re sending our deepest condolences to all who knew and cherished Julie, whether or not personally or by the deep connections she cast with readers of her memoirs.”

Powell’s 2005 e-book, Julie & Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny House Kitchen, turned the hit movie Julie & Julia, directed by Nora Ephron, with the creator portrayed within the film by Amy Adams, whereas Meryl Streep performed Little one.

Her sophomore and final effort — titled Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat, and Obsession — was a bit jarring in its honesty. Powell revealed she had an affair, the ache of loving two males without delay, her fondness for sadomasochism and even wrote about self-punishing intercourse with a stranger.

“Individuals coming from the film Julie & Julia and selecting up Cleaving are going to be in for some emotional whiplash,” she advised The Related Press in 2009. “I do not imagine it may be a Nora Ephron film.”

Powell started her affair in 2004, as she was placing the ending touches on her first e-book — a time, she writes, when she was “starry-eyed and vaguely discontented and had an excessive amount of time on my palms.”

By 2006, she had landed an apprenticeship at a butcher store two hours north of New York Metropolis, which supplied an escape from her crumbling marriage and a spot to discover her childhood curiosity with butchers.

“The best way they held a knife of their hand was like an extension of themselves,” Powell stated. “I am a really clumsy particular person. I do not play sports activities. That type of bodily talent is absolutely overseas to me, and I am actually envious of that.”

The e-book explores the hyperlink between butchering and her personal tortured romantic life. At one level, whereas chopping the connective tissue on a pig’s leg, she writes: “It is unhappy, however a aid as effectively, to know that two issues so intently certain collectively can separate with so little violence, leaving clean surfaces as an alternative of bloody shreds.”

Her e-book tapped into the rising curiosity in old-school butchery, and her expertise slicing meat really resulted in her consuming much less of it. She was an advocate for humanely raised and slaughtered animals.

“Individuals need to get their palms soiled. Individuals need to take part within the course of. Individuals need to know the place their meals is coming from,” Powell stated. “Individuals don’t need the thriller anymore.”

She is survived by her husband, Eric.