Julie & Julia
My Year of Cooking Dangerously
by Julie Powell

List Price: $13.99
Pages: 336
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 0316013269
Publisher: LIttle, Brown

I was born and raised in Austin, Texas. After graduating from a northeastern liberal arts college with an incredibly useful double major in theater and fiction writing, I embarked, with husband-to-be Eric in tow, upon a seven-year foray into New York City's dizzying wealth of temp jobs. This enlightening tour of desperate dead-end jobs culminated in a year-long blogging endeavor, "The Julie/Julia Project," which ended in late August of 2003. I now write in my pajamas for a living - long may this career path continue. I live in a "loft" in Long Island City, Queens, with my long-suffering husband, three cats, one snake, and a 110-pound dog named Robert.

I found Julia Child website created by the Smithsonian, both fascinating and enormously helpful in writing Julie and Julia. Aside from the usual suspects - chowhound.com, egullet.com, epicurious.com - I'm a regular Salon reader, and a guilty fan of the entire Gawker empire, particularly wonkette.com.

My answer to "what's your favorite read" changes every time I'm asked it, but I can say that as far as cookbook authors, Paul Prudhomme, Andries de Groot and, yes, Nigella Lawson are folks I enormously admire. Elizabeth Gilbert is a fantastic writer as well as a great person, and I look forward to her next book with bated breath. I am in awe of Alice Munro. As a kid I was a bit of a sci-fi and fantasy geek, and read Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's trilogy on a bi-yearly basis, and was a big fan of Pyrdain Chronicles by Lloyd Alexander.

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