At the time, blogging was still a relatively new format, and Powell became one of its leading figures, winning widespread praise for her accessible and self-deprecating style of writing.
“She wrote about food in a really human voice that sounded like people I knew,” fellow food blogger Deb Perelman told the Times. “She communicated that you could write about food even without going to culinary school, without much experience, and in a real-life kitchen.”
The writer’s sudden death was met with shock on Twitter, where thousands of fans flocked to pay tribute.
“I remember with alarming clarity what it felt like to find Julie Powell’s blog in the mid-2000s, when I was bored and frustrated and not writing what I wanted to; she made things feel possible in a way I had not seen them before. I’m so sad about this news,” one wrote.
“This is just heartbreaking news,” another mourned. “Follow those dreams you’re dreaming right now.”
Julie Powell, whose blog and book about cooking Julia Child recipes led to Amy Adams portraying her opposite Meryl Streep in the 2009 movie Julie & Julia, written and directed by Nora Ephron, has died. She was 49.
Powell died Wednesday of cardiac arrest at her home in Olivebridge, New York, her husband, Eric Powell, told The New York Times.
Streep was nominated for an Oscar for best actress her turn as Child in Columbia’s Julie & Julia, which was Ephron’s final movie (she died in June 2012). Chris Messina played Powell’s husband, while Stanley Tucci portrayed Child’s husband, Paul.
Powell, a native Texan, was a struggling writer living in Long Island City, New York, in 2002 when she set out to cook all 524 recipes in Child’s 1961 book Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume 1, in the space of a year.
Powell entertainingly wrote about her amateurish efforts in her blog, The Julie/Julia Project, which went on to attract hundreds of thousands of page views. The experience became the best-selling 2005 book Julie & Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen and then a 2009 paperback, Julie & Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously.
Ephron merged two memoirs, 2006’s My Life in France, which Child wrote with her grandnephew Alex Prud’homme, and My Year of Cooking Dangerously, for her screenplay.
In his THR review, Kirk Honeycutt described Adams’ Julie as “a lost soul” and a woman who “suffers for her blog. She drags herself to that cramped kitchen whether sick or well. She refuses to quit because it has become her identity. Without The Julie/Julia Project, she’d revert to a frustrated wife with a husband, dead-end job and another unfinished project. No joie de vivre here.”
Powell “was happy for the story to be Nora Ephron’s story,” her husband told the Times. “It did kind of sand down the quirky and the spiky and a lot of the things everyone knew her for and loved her for. And she was OK with that.”
Born Julie Foster on April 20, 1973, in Austin, Powell graduated from Amherst College in 1995 with a bachelor’s degree in theater and fiction writing. She and Eric first met in high school when they starred in a production of All My Sons, and they wed in 1998.
Her second and last book, Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat and Obsession, was published in 2009.
Julie Powell, the food writer best known for her wildly popular memoir “Julie & Julia,” has died suddenly at the age of 49.
The best-selling author passed away at her home in Olivebridge, New York, last Wednesday after going into cardiac arrest, according to the New York Times. She is survived by her husband, brother and parents.
The tome sold more than one million copies, and led to a 2009 film adaptation directed by Nora Ephron and starring Meryl Streep. Oscar nominee Amy Adams played Powell in the hit movie, which grossed almost $130 million at the box office.
“She had so much talent and emotional intelligence,” Powell’s editor, Judy Clain, told the New York Times. The publication was the first to report the writer’s tragic death on Tuesday.
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