APPETITE FOR LIFE: The Biography of Julia Child

Riley (AnaÜs: The Erotic Life of AnaÜs Nin, 1993, etc.) offers a loving, overstuffed biography of the cook from Pasadena who introduced French cooking to the American kitchen. Julia McWilliams, a leggy California girl, was an adventurous child with a huge appetite who rarely strayed into the kitchen. Equally adventurous as a young woman, and bored with her career in advertising, she joined the OSS. In 1944, while in Asia, she met the dashing Paul Child, an OSS officer and artist with a love of women, food, and poetry. After a rocky start, the two fell passionately in love. Paul introduced Julia to the pleasures of the table, and she became fascinated with food and its preparation. When Paul's new role as an American cultural attachâe took them to Paris after the war, Julia began cooking in earnest, even attending the famed Cordon Bleu school, where she wedded her American enthusiasm and sense of fun to the serious world of the gourmand. In Paris she met her lifelong collaborator, Simone (""Simca"") Beck. The two set out to create a cookbook. Mastering the Art of French Cooking, published in 1961, proved to be an immediate success. American cooks used it to escape the tyranny of frozen foods and grew to appreciate Childs's reliance on good food, not food snobbery. With her husband watching proudly from the wings, she went on to do television shows. Audiences loved her quick wit, her vibrant voice, and her slightly awkward presence in the kitchen--she was famous for getting splattered. While Riley's book is short on recipes, her details are exquisite: Julia and Paul's defense of a friend accused of communism in 1955, despite the threat to Paul's career; Julia telling her lonely sister to ""get a diaphragm and move to Paris to complete your education""; and Paul's gorgeous love letters to Julia. An exhaustively researched, charming story of a life well lived, and an admiring portrait of a good marriage.