Buy new:
$23.93$23.93
+ $6.73 Shipping & Import Fees Deposit.
Ships from: Amazon Sold by: Neptun Trading
Buy used: $15.90
Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet or computer – no Kindle device required.
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.
Using your mobile phone camera, scan the code below and download the Kindle app.
Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat, and Obsession Hardcover – Dec 1 2009
| Amazon Price | New from | Used from |
|
Kindle Edition
"Please retry" | — | — |
|
Audible Audiobook, Unabridged
"Please retry" |
$0.00
| Free with your Audible trial | |
|
Audio CD, Audiobook, CD, Unabridged
"Please retry" | $35.98 | — |
Purchase options and add-ons
Her marriage challenged by an insane, irresistible love affair, Julie decides to leave town and immerse herself in a new obsession: butchery. She finds her way to Fleischer's, a butcher shop where she buries herself in the details of food. She learns how to break down a side of beef and French a rack of ribs--tough, physical work that only sometimes distracts her from thoughts of afternoon trysts.
The camaraderie at Fleischer's leads Julie to search out fellow butchers around the world--from South America to Europe to Africa. At the end of her odyssey, she has learned a new art and perhaps even mastered her unruly heart.
- Print length320 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherLittle, Brown and Company
- Publication dateDec 1 2009
- Dimensions15.24 x 2.54 x 23.5 cm
- ISBN-109780316003360
- ISBN-13978-0316003360
Frequently bought together

Customers who bought this item also bought
Julie & Julia 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen aFirst First edition by Julie Powell (2005) PaperbackPaperback$6.02 shippingGet it by Friday, Nov 24Only 1 left in stock.
Sierra's Homecoming & Montana Royalty: A 2-in-1 CollectionLinda Lael MillerMass Market PaperbackOnly 3 left in stock (more on the way).
Product description
Review
"Got a hobby you consider therapy? You'll eat up this second memoir by the author of Julie and Julia. In it, Powell tries to end an adulterous affair by immersing herself in an apprenticeship at a butcher shop--and embarks on a world tour of meat. How she finds her way home is the marrow of this tell-all travelogue/love story. Well done!" (Self Elisabeth Egan)
"From the title to the last page, former blogger Julie Powell's startling second memoir, Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat, and Obsession, is smart and compelling.... Powell's steadfast femininity and confident voice are refreshing." (The San Francisco Chronicle Laura Impellizzeri)
"Ms. Powell is a wonderful prose writer." (The Wall Street Journal Moira Hodgson)
"[A]s intoxicating as baked bone marrow.... Powell is reckless, yes, but also incredibly brave as she cuts through the raw flesh of her marriage, exposing every quivering nerve. It is an evisceration not without its insight and hard-won rewards. It's also funny....The book's joys are many.... In her self-gutting story we see our own fleshy vulnerabilities when it comes to the intricacies of love."
(The Houston Chronicle Greg Morago)
"[A]n engaging writer. Fast, funny and observant...she's your mean best friend sending instant messages that make you snort at your desk." (The New York Times Book Review Christine Muhlke)
About the Author
Product details
- ASIN : 0316003360
- Publisher : Little, Brown and Company; 1st edition (Dec 1 2009)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 320 pages
- ISBN-10 : 9780316003360
- ISBN-13 : 978-0316003360
- Item weight : 544 g
- Dimensions : 15.24 x 2.54 x 23.5 cm
- Best Sellers Rank: #998,078 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #35,897 in Memoirs (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

Julie Powell thrust herself from obscurity (and an uninspiring temp job) to cyber-celebrityhood when, in 2002, she embarked on an ambitious yearlong cooking (and blogging) expedition through all 524 recipes in Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking. She detailed the experience in her critically acclaimed 2005 New York Times bestselling memoir, Julie & Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously, which was adapted into a major motion picture starring Meryl Streep and Amy Adams in August 2009. Julie has made appearances on national television shows from ABC's "Good Morning America" and CBS's "The Early Show" to "The Martha Stewart Show" and Food Network's "Iron Chef America," and her writing has appeared in numerous magazines and newspapers including Bon Appétit, Food and Wine, Harper's Bazaar, New York Times, Washington Post, and more. She is a two-time James Beard Award winner, has been awarded an honorary degree from Le Cordon Bleu in Paris, and was the first ever winner of the Overall Lulu Blooker Prize for Books.
Customer reviews
-
Top reviews
Top reviews from Canada
There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.
I just did not love Cleaving. I tried, I honestly did, and I continued to read this long after I wanted to stop. Right away the tone of the book came off as indulgent to me, it was all "Julie this", and "Julie that". Of course, this book is a memoir, so it had to be about Julie, but she just struck me as being so selfish all of the time!
Let me try to explain why I felt this way, as I'm not in the habit of cutting up books without some reasoning to back me up. First of all, the fact that this book was about raw meat did not turn me off at all, although I'm sure that it would be too much for some. I grew up on a large chicken farm, and the chickens were being raised and killed expressly to provide the raw chicken that you see in the grocery store. This was how I was raised- certain animals are raised solely to provide meat for human consumption, and that is just the way that is. As a teenager I worked at a local butcher shop. Although I did not butcher the meat myself, it was done on premises, so again, no squeamishness for me. I suppose the reason that I really did not like this book was because in no way could I identify with the author. She's married to a pretty great guy, who loves her and encourages her and puts up with her hissy fits, and she risks it all to have wild sex with D., someone that they both knew in college. Eric finds out about it. They try to seperate for a bit, but end up living under the same roof again. Eric takes his own lover. Julie breaks up with hers, but never stops wanting him. She proceeds to go out and have sex with strangers just to try to feel closer to D. Although they discuss seperation or marriage counselling, neither Julie nor Eric seem to try to work on their marriage, yet they see little reason to offically divorce. I can tell you right now that this kind of thing would not work for me, nor could I relate to how she felt. It just seemed so farcical to me, like "you can have your cake and eat it too".
There were a few positive bits of the book for me. Fleisher's, the butcher shop where Julie apprentices seems like a pretty great place, and the people who work there appear to be warm and caring. Also, Julie's trips at the end of the book to learn more about meat are interesting for an armchair traveller such as myself. Other than those brief shining parts, I would give this book a miss. I'm not sure why I was initially so determined to read this one, but now I wish that I would have given it a miss and focused instead on reading something that I would have enjoyed more.
Top reviews from other countries
It details her two year long affair, her yearlong plus despair after her lover ended the affair, and her ongoing minimal regard for her husband's anguish before, during, and after (he knew virtually the whole time).
It is frankly the most selfish, self absorbed, self delusional book I've ever read. Everything is couched in terms of well "I needed this", "I had to do this". She justifies the whole thing by saying well our picture perfect marriage really wasn't picture perfect and sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do to find yourself and find your way back. Picture Gov Mark Sanford (remember him?) but this time openly having his affair with his Argentinian soulmate for two years and then being so soul wrenchingly broken when his mistress ends it that he leaves home for a year plus, first with a job as a butcher in a town so far from home he has to rent a nearby apartment, then after that ends he starts traveling solo to countries around the world just to be around butchers, eat an enormous amount of meat, sulk and obsess continually about his lost lover. Then finally decides that the sight and touch of his spouse no longer repluses him and he goes home to get on with his marriage and two days into that has lunch with his old lover and tells his wife they will continue to get together as they have alot to "talk about" but that he promises they probably won't sleep together any more because his ex mistress doesn't seem to want to. Picture that and you got the jist of this whole book.
If that doesn't sound appetizing then picture all the endless desciptions of butchering slabs of dead animals, or better yet actually slaughtering live animals.
I could have lived with all glory details if there just hadn't been so much needless cruelty. I'm talking about what she did to her husband, not the animals. No amount of self exploration justifies carrying on a obessive love affair for two years while still sleeping in the same bed with your husband every night. Knowing that he has read your sobbing, obsessive, pleading texts to your lover both during the affair and the year after when you are so tightly clinging to your lost love that you stalk him both physically and cyber-ly. All while you claim to love your husband like no other, that you are so close you read each other's thoughts, but oh by the way for now (I'm sure it will clear up at some point) the idea of being around him, or touching him kinda makes you wanna hurl.
Once you get married I believe you are no longer entitled to sow oats and figure your spouse will stand patiently by cuz "you need this". If Julie Powell had half the guts she had in her first book she would have divorced her husband and committed herself to her new path. Or she would have found a way to stay faithful and make needed improvements in her less than picture perfect marriage. She chose neither path. In fact she never chooses between any two things. She wants and therefore she haves and haves and haves. Consequences be dammed. And then she writes a book about it. A book filled with so much longing and need for her lover that her husband only skimmed the book, so much TMI that her mother is not allowed to read the book, and many of her friends refuse to read the book. And me? Well I'm sorry I read it. And I predict you will be too.
Then I read "Cleaving", the memoir about Julie Powell's life AFTER "Julie and Julia", the fame, the infidelity, the crumbling marriage, the new goal (to learn butchering)! Yes, I get the metaphors. Life, especially marriage, like butchering, is bloody, messy, and hard to learn. You have to hack away to get to the good parts, I know. And, yes, this was Julie. . had to be. . the writing style, the metaphors, the humor, the wrapping of her life around a goal,. ., all of it was there. Great writing, compelling stories, familiar use of metaphor, humor, and self-deprecation, but. . . who IS this woman?? Was there ANY hint of her in "Julie and Julia"? Did we ever even BEGIN to know her before??
As hard as it was to read some of the passages about actual butchering in this book, harder still were Powell's accounts of her hacking away at herself and her personal relationships, her marriage in particular during this time. Must we butcher others' souls to be ourselves? Is this really the heroine of "Julie and Julia"? Was/is she really that narcissitic, self-destructive, self-defeating, sadomasochistic, and clueless? An adulturer without boundaries of any sort, who seems to be without conscience as she moves through other people's lives without a backward look, stalking those who refuse to continue to play her game, and recklessly using those who will? Did fame do this or was she like this all along? Does she have any insight or accept any responsibility? These questions made the book even more compelling for me and I couldn't put it down. I've thought about it almost every day since I finished it. I liked it, I loathed it, and it continues to intrigue me; I will discuss it with anyone who will listen.
I guess that means it's a good book and it certainly fulfills my purposes for reading memoirs. Although I couldn't like her as I did in her first book, this Julie Powell intrigued me and wouldn't leave my mind. I kept trying to diagnose her (bipolar? borderline? just plain narcissitic?) and I'm still sure there's a category somewhere for her in the DSM-IVR. I can't wait for her next memoir.
The answer? It wasn't a neat, frothy little journey of self-discovery with a predictably happy ending.
Now, that said, I *liked* Powell's first book, much better than I liked the movie. Still, the very situation made for comic moments to which a wide audience could easily relate. Who hasn't tried a recipe that was beyond our means and had it blow up in our face?
I see a lot of people complaining (quite cruelly) that Powell's husband is a 'doormat'. In fact, his actions are no different than they were during the first book. He loves his wife. He wants her to be happy. In the first book, helping her achieve something which boosted her self-confidence and self-worth was what she needed. In the second book, what she needs and wants is some time to stand alone. And as much as it hurt him, he loved her enough to give that to her.
Too, Powell's husband also recognizes one thing which I, too, recognized: Powell got married at what I would consider to be a ridiculously young age. Although her husband apparently spent a year traveling and lived independently, she went directly from college to marriage, spent no time on her own, never really had a chance to be independent. When you're not yet 40 and you've spent almost half your life with someone, that's pretty sobering. Certainly it's enough to make anyone rethink their might-have-beens. Keep in mind, also, Powell is also a sufferer of PCOS, and while I do not personally have this (thank goodness) I have several friends who do, and let me tell you, the hormonal roller coaster ride is no picnic, neither for the sufferer nor for their loved ones.
The easy, predictable book for Powell to have written would have been a lovely little witty piece wherein she drove to her internship, had predictable but funny incidents of things going awry, and finally emerging as a full-fledged butcher, with her husband smiling benignly behind her.
I'm glad she didn't write that book. I admit, there were sections where, if Powell was a friend of mine and if she were confiding in me, that I would have given her a good hard shake...but it also made her human, and her story believable.
What I liked most about Powell's first book was her writing style and her dry wit. I also appreciate her brutal self-honesty. She also showed a side of foodie-ism that most foodies neither wish to know about nor appreciate, if they do: exactly where and how their prized meat cuts come into being. To many foodies, I imagine this is TMI in the extreme. I find it blunt and refreshing.
What makes the book a hard read is her obsession with the man she has the affair with. She has to learn the hard way that she wants something she can never have. Granted, having married young with limited dating experience she has not learned the lesson many of us learn; to not confuse anxiety, excitement and desire over a person with love. She has not yet gained the understanding that the constancy of real love is far better. When she writes about the affair, she is whiny, clingy and a sorry thing.
Although I do appreciate the honesty in what she writes, perhaps this would have been a better book if she had left out much of the drama with her spouse and her lover. There is tension to be created from what was not said. Even I flinched when she describes buying an expensive item for her lover. There was real betrayal in that action and at that point the book became an impossible read for me.
Despite her lovely and honest descriptions of her travels abroad, I ended up skimming through to the end of the book disheartened.
Marriage is hard work, and she doesn't seem to be working very hard at it for most of the book. She doesn't express any real regret over the affair and the damage to her marriage; which I find most troubling of all. Maybe privately she acknowledges this, but it is not made clear, especially at the end when she makes the choices she does. Perhaps this would have been a better book if she had waited until after a few years to gain some perspective.
Life is not a fairy tale and I think Powell should be commended for trying to not write another priv-lit book ala "Eat, Pray, Love". Despite the self-serving mush this book is, there is a real talent for her writing and her honesty and have hope for Powell's next book.
It is not an overtly funny book- readers expecting the dark humor and wit seen in 'Julie & Julia'- will be disappointed. This book is looking between the lines of Julie & Julia- taking a closer look at the hints of depression and mania seen in the 'meltdowns', and where those ended up.
The writing style in this book has been criticized- but I find it conversational, like I'm reading a friends blog or a series of well-crafted essays with narrative flashbacks. It's not in the traditional literary/linear style, but is far more stream-of-consciousness in its narrative. Some will find this off-putting, others will find its like sitting down to a good conversation. Most of our minds sidetrack in our daily lives- we'll be doing something we've done hundreds of times, and find our mind wandering. I found it a very brave choice to write along those lines of thought.
This book uses the very technical butchery as both a description of day-to-day work as well as a metaphor for cutting down into one's self, and cutting away the bits that get in the way of self understanding. Her journeyman travels were both about her finding herself further along her new career path, -taking a fully different and difficult road away from customer service, as well as finding her own voice in the world, and finding her way home.
This book should be shelved near Jodee Blanco's "Please Stop Laughing At Me".
This is not a good book. It is one of the *great* books for women finding their own voice and self-understanding, and learning how to make their own way, and cutting their own path in the world.





