What is Julia Child's My Life in France about?

Julia Child never quite finished this book herself. She worked on it with Alex Prud'homme, her husband's grandnephew, during the last months of her life, and he completed it after she died in August 2004. It was published by Knopf in 2006, and it reads as if she is sitting across the kitchen table telling you how it all happened.

The story

In 1948 Paul Child was posted to Paris with the United States Information Agency, and Julia went with him. She was a Californian in her mid-thirties who had only started learning to cook after meeting Paul, and she had no particular plan. France changed both.

The memoir follows what happened next:

• Falling for French food. Meals, markets, ingredients and the seriousness with which the French treated eating. Child later called France her spiritual homeland.
• Le Cordon Bleu. She enrolled at the cooking school in Paris and threw herself into it. She failed her final exam the first time and passed on the retake, which is one of the book's most cheering details.
• The three gourmandes. Through a cooking club, the Gourmettes, she met Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle. The three set up a small cooking school, L'École des Trois Gourmandes, and Beck and Bertholle asked Child to help them finish a French cookbook written for Americans.
• The book. That project, the years of work, a rejection from one publisher and the eventual acceptance by Knopf under a new title, became Mastering the Art of French Cooking, published in 1961.
• Beyond Paris. Postings in Marseille and time in Provence widen the picture of France beyond the capital.

The tone

Exuberant. Child writes with the same energy people remember from her television programmes: curious, enthusiastic, funny about her own disasters, and utterly unpretentious. She loved good food without snobbery, and she makes the reader feel that anyone willing to learn could cook it.

It is also a love story about a marriage. Paul, an artist and poet as well as a government officer, is everywhere in the book, and their partnership is one of its warmest threads.

Why cooks love it

It is about learning. Child arrives knowing very little and works her way to mastery through classes, practice, failure and stubbornness. Anyone who has learned to cook as an adult recognises the arc.

It respects technique and pleasure equally. She cares about doing things properly, but never at the expense of enjoying the meal.

It is a portrait of a food culture. Post-war France, its markets, restaurants, shopkeepers and home kitchens, seen through the eyes of someone falling in love with it.

It shows that late starts are fine. Child found her vocation well into adulthood. That alone has made the book a favourite gift for anyone thinking about starting something new. See our page on confidence when starting something new.

Book and film

Nora Ephron's 2009 film Julie & Julia was adapted from this memoir and from Julie Powell's memoir of cooking every recipe in Mastering the Art of French Cooking in a year, and it weaves the two stories together. The film is charming, but the memoir gives you far more of France and of Julia herself.