I had to take mental-health leave from my job.
I wasn’t where I wanted to be in my writing career, either, and this fact helped tip me into the sheer worst depressive episode I’ve ever experienced. I stewed literally, in a too-small bathtub in a too-small house I didn’t want to be living in. The process sounds simple and easy, and in one sense-the retrospective sense-it is. Step four: Use this obsession as either less direct inspiration or very direct inspiration. Step three: While stewing in frustration and envy of those who’ve somehow made it, develop an obsession with the one person whose career looks so great, so transcendently beautiful and awe-inducing that you just want to puke. Step one: Desire to have a writing career. Other people have had this experience? We should call it the Julie & Julia Formula! How the formula works in general This is my story too, I thought, listening. Turns out she’s a giant Nora Ephron fan, and Ephron’s work had helped her become successful in just the same way. Meanwhile, Sarah Marshall recognized her own career in this fan-guru dynamic. Which is a way of saying that, through her fandom of Julia Child, Julie Powell most definitely reached her writing dreams, and then some.
JULIE AND JULIA MOVIE
The blog eventually grew so popular that it became a book, then a movie directed by Nora Ephron.
In case you haven’t seen it, Julie & Julia tells the true story of Julie Powell, a frustrated young writer who, in the early aughts, started blogging about her attempt to cook every recipe in Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking. “You can reach your dreams by loving another person’s work,” Marshall said, identifying this as the central dynamic of the 2009 movie. I just never thought to codify until I heard it discussed on a podcast.Ī couple of weeks ago, on You Are Good, a film-discussion show, the journalist Sarah Marshall happened to be analyzing Julie & Julia. I learned this firsthand, the hard way, and it led to the agent, auction and “Big 5” book deal of my nerdiest dreams. The secret is fandom: dedicated and even obsessive engagement with another writer’s work. In all honesty, it is the single greatest writing-career secret I’ve ever stumbled across-like really stumbled across, feet flying out from under me, coffee mug launched into space-and I won’t even make you skim 800 words to discover it. Today’s post is by author Catherine Baab-Muguira ( widely applicable career-hacks are rare in the writing life. “happy birthday, julia child!” by Rakka is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
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