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Chapter 01

Julie’s failure to fulfil her potential is splashed across the city’s media by a fake friend.

It is post 9/11, and Julie works at a call centre at the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation dealing with other people’s crises. Julie has a loving, supportive husband but a stressful job. She has the soul of a writer but no outlet and sporadic inspiration, and a history of never finishing her projects. She feels, in short, that there must be more to life than this.

Julie draws inspiration from the person she most admires, Julia Child, who became a famous American TV chef in the early 960s. Encouraged by her husband, Eric, Julie embarks on a blog of her progress through Julia’s cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking. It contains over 500 recipes that Julie sets out to cook in precisely one year.

Between work and cooking, Julie reads books about Julia’s life, which is told in flashbacks starting in postwar Paris. The parallels between Julie and Julia's lives become apparent: discouraged by her mother just as Julia suffers the disapproval of her father and the director of the Cordon Bleu school; relocated for their husbands’ work, both women are directionless until finding inspiration, purpose and joy through food and cooking, especially for husbands who adore what they produce.

However, Julie’s life is more challenging than that of her idealised Julia. The two women love their husbands and cooking, but Julie’s love for one puts the other to the test. Working in a cramped kitchen, a far cry from the one in Julia's expansive, gracious, Parisian apartment, within a tight budget, overwhelmed by the enormity of the task she has set herself and intoxicated by her growing popularity with her blog readers, brings Julie’s marriage to the brink and threatens her job.