On a visit to her childhood home in Texas, Julie Powell pulls her mother's battered copy of Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking off the bookshelf- And the book calls out to her. Pushing thirty, living in a rundown apartment in Queens, and working at a dead-end secretarial job, Julie Powell is stuck. Is she in danger of becoming just another version of the house-wife-in-a-rui?

Her only hope lies in a dramatic self-rescue mission. And so she invents a deranged assignment; in the space of one year, she will cook every recipe in the Julia Child classic, all 524 of them. No skips, no substitutions. She will track down every obscure ingredient, learn every arcane cooking technique, and cook her way through sixty pounds of butter. And if it doesn't help her make sense of her life, at least she'll eat really, really well. How hard could it he?

But as Julie moves from the smooth sailing of Potage Parmentier into the culinary backwaters of aspics and calves' brains, she realizes there's more to Mastering the Art of French Cooking than meets the eye. For every heavenly meal, an obscenity-laced nervous breakdown lurks on the horizon. But with Julia's stern warble steady in her ear, Julie carries on.

She battles sauces that separate, and she haunts the city's butchers, buying kidneys and sweetbreads, Her husband endures the crying jags and midnight dinners. Together they discover how to mold the perfect orange Bavarian cream, the trick to extracting marrow from bone, and the illicit thrills of eating liver. With fierceness, irreverence, and unbreakable resolve, Julie Powell learns Julia Child's most important lesson: the art of living with gusto.

Alter spending a long, long time working as a temp, Julie Powell now writes in her pajamas in Long Island City, Queens, where she shares a "loft" apartment ' with her husband, Eric; their dog, Robert; their eats, Maxine, Lumi, and Cooper; and their snake. Zuzu Marlene.