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Hey, How'd You Cook Up A Book and Film Deal From Your Blog, Julie Powell?

The Julie & Julia author whipped up a career from a budding food blog to a tell-all memoir and film deal

By Andrea K. Hammer – August 10, 2009

-Photo by Kelly Campbell
An aspiring writer trapped in a series of temporary secretarial jobs, Julie Powell had an epiphany as she approached her 30th birthday: To add some desperately needed zest to her life, she decided to blend a love of cooking with her passion for writing. In 2002, Powell challenged herself to tackle each recipe in Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking while following her husband's prompt to launch a companion blog, The Julie/Julia Project.

In entries about her daily cooking experiences that revealed her spicy wit, Powell mixed in ingredients from her personal life, catching mainstream attention. After the blog ended in 2003, Powell published Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen, (Little, Brown and Company, 2005). Last month, the mass-market paperback edition, Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously was distributed as a tie-in to the highly anticipated release of the film Julie & Julia by screenwriter Nora Ephron; Meryl Streep stars as Julia Child, Stanley Tucci as Paul Child, Amy Adams as Julie Powell and Chris Messina as Eric Powell.

During a week of back-to-back interviews surrounding the red-carpet "special screening" in Los Angeles (described on her current blog, What Could Happen?), Powell caught up with mediabistro.com before the movie's nationwide release on August 7 to discuss how she conceived of and executed her blog and book, the influence her readership has on her writing career, and the recipe for building a personal blog brand....

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