Julia McWilliams was always adventurously hunting for food to fill her 6'2" frame. When, in her late 20s, the Smith College-educated Californian took a wartime job with the OSS that sent her to Ceylon (Sri Lanka) and China, she began cultivating a taste for authentic eatables as an alternative to service fare. Almost resigned to spinsterhood, she met and married Cambridge, Mass.-born government official Paul Child, who was on Asian duty, and accompanied him to his USIA posts in France and Germany. A gastronomical epiphany that occurred in Rouen, at the bistro where the couple once lunched, led her to attend the Cordon Bleu cooking school in Parisand the rest is history. In 1961, Child published the three-pound bestseller Mastering the Art of French Cooking when she was 49, and a few years later she was a TV superstar conducting gustatory symphonies with whisks and pans and patter. Her life is told warmly and compellingly by Fitch, author of several books on literary and culinary Paris, who nicely captures Child's exuberant mannerisms and plummy voice that fans know so well. Her graphic diary-letters, extracted at length by Fitch, register the couple's experiences together and the emotions they shared.****Rate this book 4/5. I have to admit that after I saw the movie "Julie & Julia" I became very interested in the life of Julia Child. This was a very good book about a fabulous woman. She was ahead of her time as far as I am concerned: an appetite for life as big as her appetite for food. I loved her marriage to Paul Child being remembered as one in which they both respected and loved each other deeply, and were indeed, true partners. I doubt many of us have the love and consideration for each other that these two did, and total opposites nonetheless. Fascinating woman, Ms. Julia Child. Your life was rich and full and you enjoyed every minute of it.
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