Hunger pangs

THIS WEEK’S WINNER

MANILA, Philippines - Irish Dizon is “a willing corporate serf by night, and a budding pen warrior by day. I juggle the realistic and the idealistic with a smile and lots of multivitamins. I found my rabbit hole in the form of a writing stint, and I intend to go through the adventure to the very end.”

How do you choose your books? Would you believe me if I told you that the books I have read and loved chose me and not the other way around? It sounds absurd, but most of the time, if not propelled by a sincere review, I wander aimlessly into my favorite old-Manila themed National Book Store branch at the Shangri-La Plaza and wait for the pull. There is no exact science to my selection process. Most of the time, books just seem to instinctively know what I seek and present themselves to me at the right place and time. 

The day I chanced upon Julie & Julia, I was feeling an acute sense of hunger, and I’m not just talking about the bodily kind. Outwardly, I was fine, and people were none the wiser about the storm that was brewing inside. I was hungry for excitement, for a challenge, and most importantly, I was craving for fulfillment. This is one of the reasons why I sometimes forego food to satiate my need for the written word instead. Lady Gaga, in an interview with Ricky Lo for The Philippine STAR, cheekily answered that she doesn’t eat because books feed her body’s nutrient needs. Physical hunger is fleeting, but answers to existential pangs are priceless.

The book that caught my interest was, incidentally, all about food. Seeing Amy Adams and the great Meryl Streep on the cover lured me in. A memoir about a culinary adventure seemed like the perfect antidote to my ennui.

It is a shame that readers are a dying breed because many characters and stories are incredibly fleshed out in between covers but are insufficiently brought to life in film (case in point: The Time Traveler’s Wife’s Claire and Henry). All 359 pages allowed me to get to know Julie Powell and how her mind works. I wonder if two hours or so in celluloid are enough to satisfactorily capture her idiosyncrasies and misadventures.

Getting to know Julie was engaging because I could easily identify with her and her situation. Julie is hardly a typical heroine — crass where other leads are refined; plain where others are luminous. She’s pushing 30 and has a condition called Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome, which has unfairly predisposed her to a life of unwanted fat and body hair. There’s also pressure from her mother and even her orthopedist to have a baby. On top of that, Julie’s neither here nor there with a soul-deadening job.

She came to New York to become an actress but ended up hopping from one temporary job to another. With time ticking away and a profound feeling of emptiness constantly gnawing at her, is it any wonder the girl’s prone to fits of insanity?

Her redemption comes unexpectedly. One night in 2002, after enjoying a potato soup whose recipe she got from Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking Vol. 1, her husband Eric brings up the topic of creating a blog where Julie can record her up-and-coming culinary voyage. He thought Julie’s cooking was so good that he egged her on to pursue cooking.

At the time, “nobody knew about blogs except a few guys like Eric who spend their days using company computers to pursue the zeitgeist. No issue of domestic or international policy was too big, no pop-culture backwater too obscure; it was all one big, beautiful sliding scale.”

Of course, now it’s a totally different scenario. With the advent of social networking sites, even the most mundane things can be posted for the entire world to know.

What I loved most about her story is its brutal honesty. To illustrate using photography parlance, her meltdowns and flaws were chronicled not in the soft glow of warm yellow light, but in the harsh rays of bright, white lights. For instance, she admits to being a potty mouth with a godawful bad temper. Reading her work was cathartic for me because she made me realize that feeling inadequate and being restless about life in general should be acknowledged. It’s great to be perennially positive but it’s unnatural, not to mention unhealthy, to keep brushing aside the blues. We have to confront them head-on and find ways to turn them into good things.

And turn her blues into a good thing she did. Sure she kept her dreary day job, but she also had an alternate universe where she “took butter and cream and meat and eggs and made delicious sustenance. She took her anger and despair and rage and transformed it with her alchemy into hope and ecstatic mania. Here she took a crap laptop and some words that popped into her head at seven in the morning and turned them into something people wanted, maybe even needed.”

Julie’s frustration about being an actress/writer is something I fully understand. Without a doubt, being in a job that pays the bills when your heart is somewhere else is pure torture. You are torn between the practical and the ideal. The younger version of her wanted to be an actress but her passion has fizzled out. Instead of deafening applause and movie sets, her “bleaders” are the spectators who give her the sense of societal approval we all seek.

Her turnaround was thanks in large part to her supportive husband and a source of confidence that does not depend on the size of one’s pants: intelligence. It takes just one person who believes in us and loves us unconditionally to make us fly, and it is comforting to know that you have something beyond a great gluteus maximus.

Julie may be a ball of excess baggage but her tenacity is unquestionable. She bravely takes on the challenge of cooking every single recipe in Mastering the Art of French Cooking Vol. 1 and conquers it. The road to victory is not easy but she does not let up. She accomplishes what she had set out to do — exhaustion, fear and occasional disgust notwithstanding.

Julie finds her rabbit hole and follows it to the very end. A lot of crazy things happen along the way but she finds her redemption in the end. She has inspired me to follow my own rabbit hole as well and goodness where it will take me. All I know is that everything will turn out like a crazy, good dream.