And yet, she has two book deals

Julie Powell, the bloggy half of Julie and Julia, has penned a piece over at XX. It is, how do you say, awful? Yes, awful. That’s the word.

The concept behind the piece is bad enough (assuming I’ve understood her intent correctly*): Julie is complaining that the movie has gotten her all wrong by writing about how the movie got her cat all wrong. You see, the movie cat is as different from the real cat as Amy Adams is from Julie Powell, and in exactly the same ways! Or some such. The conceit might actually work if it wasn’t executed so damn poorly. Consider this passage, for example:

None of this comes through in the movie Julie & Julia. Which I understand was inevitable—a movie is not a book, ever, and the uplifting story Nora Ephron is telling—about how an extraordinary woman’s transformation and the world-changing book that came out of that went on to inspire one secretary from Queens to change her own life—leaves little room for quirks and rough edges, for complex motives or attempts at self-awareness.

Just try and diagram that second sentence. It’s a freaking trainwreck. Em dashes within em dashes, that extraneous “ever” after “book,” the unnecessary “which” that begins the sentence, turning it into a fragment, etc. It’s a nightmare to read, especially once one finally realizes just how self-absorbed the final point is: How dare Nora Ephron catapult my story to fame and help me sell thousands upon thousands more copies of my book without fully capturing meeeeeeeeee!

Ugh. For her sake I hope some gung-ho editor mucked up that prose.

*The fact that I’m questioning my understanding of her intent should convey just how much of a mess the piece is.