Julie Powell, a blogger who gained a huge following by chronicling her attempt to cook every recipe from Julia Child’s Mastering The Art Of French Cooking on her website before turning the story into a memoir (which was later made into a film by Nora Ephron); he has died The news was confirmed by her husband, Eric Powell, who told The New York Times that she died of cardiac arrest. Powell was 49 years old. An aspiring writer at the time, Powell started her blog – The Julie/Julia Project – in 2002, when she was about to turn 30. An untrained chef, Powell challenged herself to cook every recipe in Child’s book and called her her experience with a down-to-earth, playfully snarky and profane tone that challenged preconceived notions about food writing and who was “allowed” to write about food. Amanda Hesser, a New York Times writer at the time, profiled Powell and her journey in 2003, generating renewed interest in the blog and attracting the attention of publisher Little, Brown & Company, who turned it into the book Julie & Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen (later retitled Julie & Julia: My Year Of Cooking Dangerously in paperback). The book sold over a million copies and – along with Child’s own memoir, My Life In France – became the basis of Nora Ephron’s Julie & Julia, a kind of double biopic about Powell and Child. Although the film demolished “the weird and the edgy and a lot of what everybody knew [Powell] because he loved her,” her husband told the New York Times, was okay with the changes and “was happy that the story was Nora Ephron’s story.” It would be Efron’s last film before her death in 2012. Powell’s second book, Cleaving: A Story Of Marriage, Meat, And Obsession, was released in 2009 and was not as well received. It followed her experience learning to be a butcher along with the story of her and her husband’s relationship. The New York Times reports that he continued to write after that, but never published another book. G/O Media may receive a commission However, the initial success of her blog fundamentally changed professional writing and brought it into the modern age. She was an early victory for the democratization the Internet offered when it was still relatively new, and her life underscored the dream that anyone with a good idea and the talent to make it happen can be successful simply by being themselves. .
