Rethinking Happily Ever After with 'Julie & Julia'
And the poignancy of the movie's fairy-tale ending.
Have you ever rewatched a movie long after it first came out, only to find your entire experience of it has changed, because you have changed?
That was me with Julie & Julia.
Earlier this year, I had the movie playing in the background to keep me company while working. If you aren’t familiar, Julie & Julia is the 2009 Nora Ephron film adaptation of the late Julie Powell’s nonfiction book of the same name. Based on her popular Salon.com blog, the movie depicts Julie’s yearlong project chronicling how she made all 524 dishes in Julia’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and Julia Child’s journey to authoring the cookbook, which would make her a culinary icon.
So I worked on my novel while Meryl Streep made cute faces while creating the dishes that would be in her seminal cookbook, and Amy Adams made cute faces exhibiting her frustration at recreating Julia’s dishes for her blog.
I paid little attention until near the end, when Julie’s blog goes viral and scores her a New York Times profile. Already excited to see people reading her interview in the newspaper while online at Starbucks and in the subway, Julie’s happiness is magnified when she comes home to an answering machine with 65 messages awaiting her.1
She and her husband Eric (Chris Messina, aka the best Chris) listen in awe as the messages unspool: editors from Food & Wine Magazine, Bon Appetit and Epicurious, book editors at Random House and Little, Brown, several literary agents, producers at Today and The Food Network, the different messages each a version of, “I don't know if you're interested in turning this into a book, a movie, a TV series, a one-woman show.” Followed by the same refrain: “Call me.”
In 2009, I had watched this with fascination and envy. As an aspiring novelist, everything Julie experienced as a blogger belonged in the “So You Want to Be a Bestselling Author” starter kit.
Media coverage from both popular and prestigious media outlets? Check. A major book deal? Check. A movie adaptation starring Meryl Streep and Amy Adams and directed by Nora Ephron? Check check and OMG, check.
How could this not be viewed as anything but a real-life fairy tale? For writers like me in the early aughts, it seemed nothing short of the ultimate happily ever after.
Watching the movie in 2025, after becoming an author myself, all I could feel was concern. With every new message from a breathless journalist, editor or agent, my dread for Julie deepened. I knew what awaited the real-life version after the movie credits rolled. Julie & Julia, the book and film, were instant successes. Julie’s polarizing second book, Cleaving, had been timed to come out as the same time as the film, and was critically reviled.
Julie’s blog had become a hit with readers due to her hilariously honest and skillful narration of her self-imposed Herculean task. But those who only knew of her as a Nora Ephron creation weren’t prepared for Julie’s second book, in which she revealed she had cheated on Eric and made other messy choices that even took Amy Adams aback. As Julie wryly noted in her 2009 essay for Slate, the actress had declared, “My Julie Powell wouldn’t do that.” She earned a lot of vitriol from chefs, foodies and snarky media types, best summed up by the headline “Julie & Julienned.”
Rewatching Julie & Julia made me recall that when Julie passed away in 2022 from cardiac arrest, I had looked for as many obits as I could find. I didn’t know Julie’s writing very well either, only the movie. And the shock of her sudden death at only age 49, plus my unease over only knowing her from something she didn’t have a direct hand in creating, caused me to seek out how she was covered in the media.
As someone who wrote a novel about legacy and how little control we have over how we are remembered, I worried that Julie would get flattened into a one-dimensional person, her entire life boiled down to the blog, the movie, the fame and the resulting backlash, with little information about Julie’s life beyond them. Having written obituaries myself, I knew how easily that could occur. And for the most part, it had. (Here is one example, as is the video below.)
And then I moved on, as we do all too easily these days, as one shocking headline gives way to another.
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Perhaps that is what drew me to put Julie & Julia on again earlier this year, the residual concern over how this film shaped Julie’s legacy in the public eye despite being the Disneyfied version of her life. And watching from the vantage point for the first time as a published author made me even more sympathetic and sad. And possibly, selfishly, a bit of relief.
To be transparent: I was extremely lucky to have my debut novel—the same one I referred to above—chosen as a celebrity book club pick four years ago. And that selection has been a contributing factor to why I’ve continued to have a publishing career, having released two more books since then.
On the outside, no one would have known that the first few months after my debut came out were the hardest I ever experienced. The post-publication blues are real and all too common. Mine were exacerbated because two of the novels that were the book club’s picks after my novel turned out to two of the biggest novels of the past few years, each selling over 1 million copies.
As I watched their books zoom up the bestseller list and stay there for months, I thought I had let down everyone who associated with my mine. I had no idea how book publishing worked at the time, or that nothing I could have done would have helped my novel ascend to those heights. I didn’t quite think of myself as a failure, but it was impossible to think of myself as a success in comparison.
Yet watching the scene with Julie’s endless answering machine messages made me grateful that I didn’t experience that kind of overnight success. Julie & Julia read to me as a cautionary tale of what happens when everything goes right, and you’re not prepared for it. Honestly, who could be?
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Seeing the movie again reignited my interest in Julie, specifically to learn more about Julie’s post-publication years, after the hoopla ended and she faded from public consciousness. How had she fared in the aftermath? Did she feel any bitterness over what at occurred, or had she made peace with it?
I found my answer in this 2020 interview, in which Julie graciously spoke to a writer attempting his own spin on her cookbook blogging project—one of many people who had been inspired to do during the pandemic.
Julie had this to say about the initial inspiration for her Salon blog:
“It gave me some purpose at a time when I really didn't feel I had one. And of course people think I did it because I wanted to write a book ... Now of course that's part of the game. But at that time, it was purely just this personal, whimsical notion. I did want to start writing again because I had been very frustrated as a writer and it helped me tremendously with that.”
Reading this in the Substack era (and all that it entails), it was both lovely and poignant to consider that Julie had no major goals for her blog beyond just wanting to cultivate a writing practice. And rather than chafe at being forever connected to Julia Child, who was famously unhappy with Julie’s blog, Julie described herself as “thrilled and grateful.”
“I admire [Julia] not just as a cook but as a writer and as an example for people who feel lost and managed to find a way for themselves,” she noted, referring to how Julia Child made a midlife pivot to a culinary career. “That's really what I was writing about the whole time, is how to find that passion and confidence to move forward despite seemingly impossible obstacles.”
It was only one interview, but it gave me some important takeaways:
Julie seemed to be enjoying a low-key life of simple pleasures in her final years, such as continuing to make meals with Eric (their marriage survived the extramarital affair she chronicled in Cleaving);
In addition to her connection to Julia Child, Julie’s enduring legacy is inspiring people to do the same as she did: take a leap, try something new and in her words, “figure it out;”
And she survived the chaotic whirlwind of her Julie & Julia years for the same reasons she became successful in the first place: her pragmatism, her sense of humor, and that she stayed curious and open to what each new day offered.
I am so impressed she had survived her bout of supernova fame, and sad she didn’t have more time. Yet with the time Julie did have, she seemed to surround herself with the things that made her happy.
As I worked on this piece, I came across this tribute from
, which he wrote a few weeks after Julie died:“Attention always fades; people move on; stars are only stars for so long. You just keep on living, on your own, surrounded only by the people who have known you long enough to still care. That sounds sad. But I don’t think it is. I think it’s probably the goal: To just keep making stuff, to keep moving forward, to not worry about the outside world and just take care of what’s in front of you. I hope Julie Powell found that near the end. I hope I do. I hope we all do.”
And this is what happily ever after really is. Based on her words, I believe Julie did. And to echo Will, I hope I do. I hope we all do.
MOPC-ers in the media📚
Jennifer and Saul’s books are highlighted in Vulture’s “119 Books Every Comedy Fan Should Read.” Jennifer’s New York Times bestseller Seinfeldia is praised as the “best take possible” on the iconic sitcom, and Saul is described as “one of the world’s few comedy-history professors”2 in the write-up about his book about Anchorman, Kind of a Big Deal.
Kirthana’s novels received two mentions in PEOPLE magazine: The Other Lata was named one of the best books of April, and Dava Shastri’s Last Day was highlighted as a book for fans of Taylor Jenkins Reid. She also wrote about the trend of doubles and doppelgängers in AAPI fiction for Electric Lit.
Jennifer’s book When Women Invented Television gets a prominent shout-out in Emily Nussbaum’s excellent recent New Yorker piece about one of the book’s subjects, sitcom pioneer Gertrude Berg.
Do you want to learn how to pitch pieces and write about pop culture? We’re offering an MOPC Office Hours on July 14 at 7 pm EST. Click here for more details!
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Yes, this what life was like in the early 2000s: people still read print versions of newspapers and primarily relied on landlines for communication.
Saul says he is not that rare of a commodity, but he’ll take the distinction anyway.
Wow, that Will Leitch quote really hit.
What a great article, thank you, Kirthana! I enjoyed the movie, pondered what it would be like to be THAT famous from a blog (I blogged then, still going strong, 17 years later...plus Substack!), so it's sad to hear that Julie got such backlash for being a real person (heavens! clutch my pearls!). I didn't realize she'd died so young.