Facing life with ‘Foolish Bravery’

Author Veronica Chambers tries to turn the volume down on the internal monologue of “woulda, shoulda, coulda” that plays in every woman's head with her new book “The Joy of Doing Things Badly: A Girl's Guide to Love, Life and Foolish Bravery.” In the excerpt, Chambers discusses how the late cooking guru Julia Child was an inspiration to her, reminding her that you are never too old to become great at something.

Chapter 1
What I’ve Learned From Julia Child
On the Saturday following Julia Child’s death, I was in the bathroom of a restaurant and I overheard the following conversation. The woman in the first stall said, “I’m so stupid. I tried to make myself a piece of salmon for dinner and I had no idea what to do. So I put it in the pan to saute it, but I hadn’t put any oil in so it all stuck to the pan. I didn’t know how long to cook it, so I let it cook until it was practically burned!” The woman in the second stall said, “No big deal! Did you know that Julia Child didn’t learn how to cook until she was thirty-six years old?” The first woman, the salmon torcher, emerged from the stall with a huge smile on her face. “I’ll be thirty-five on my next birthday,” she said. Her friend emerged from the stall next to her and said, “See, you could be the next Julia Child. You could change the face of cooking.”

The whole conversation made me smile because it was indicative of so many things that I’ve been thinking about: How we beat ourselves up over the tiniest things, about the primal role food plays in our lives, and how much Julia Child has taught us not only about food but also about life. It seems like the older we get, the higher the bar is raised. I remember, as a child, being so impressed by all the whiz kids that I’d read about in the news: gymnasts and ballet dancers, chess players and piano prodigies. I honestly remember thinking, at the age of eleven, that if only I applied myself then maybe I could do something with my life! Even when I ended up going to college at the age of sixteen, I still felt only average. At the early college I attended, half of the college freshmen were fifteen. The year I started college, there were two fourteen-year-old freshmen and one who was just thirteen. At sixteen, I was practically a remedial first-year college student!

Julia Child’s The Way to Cook has been a staple of my adult life. I turn to it the way I imagine that a 1950s housewife would ring up her mother. How do you steam an artichoke? How long do you boil an ear of corn? What exactly does it mean to poach a piece of fish? Whenever a direction in a recipe was puzzling, I opened The Way to Cook and “asked” Julia. In the months since Julia Child passed away, I’ve been digging into her life and learning about more than cooking. “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear” is an old Zen saying. And as I get into the thick of my thirties — the years when Julia Child got married, learned how to cook, found her true calling — I’m assured that the wisdom of the Zen saying is true. Piano prodigies and Russian gymnasts be damned, I love the idea that for both myself and the girl I overheard in the bathroom, the ride, the real roller coaster ride of life, is just about to begin. So in the unscientific and unflinchingly honest way that she heralded, here are just a few of the things that I have learned from Julia Child.

Lesson 1: Hang on to your friends.
Long before she taught the world how to cook and became in the manner of all great personalities, the kind of figure that a million strangers thought of as a friend, Julia Child was the center of a vibrant social circle. Rosemary Mannell, who served as a kind of sous chef on Julia’s first public television show, The French Chef, had known Julia and her husband since 1949 when they all lived in France. Paul Child and Rosemary’s husband, Abram, were in the Foreign Service together. The two couples became a sort of gourmet club, getting together for frequent dinners at the Childs’ apartment on the Rue de l’Universite or at the Mannells’ on the Ile St-Louis. Elizabeth Bishop, another one of the sous chefs on Julia’s show, once told a friend, “Cooking is the least of it. You know in a funny way, I feel closer to Julia than I do to anyone. Of course, I’m closer to Jack [Bishop] and the children, but there are things I could say to her that I couldn’t say to anyone else.”

There were other friends. Simca Beck and Louisette Bertholle, with whom Julia started Les Ecole de Trois Gourmands, the small, private cooking school that they ran out of the Childs’ Paris apartment. There was Avis DeVoto, who served as an informal editor for Julia’s first, groundbreaking book. “We both liked to write letters,” DeVoto told an interviewer. “There was a lot to write about. The McCarthy thing was heating up in Washington. Julia and Paul were both rather frightened by it. Sometimes we’d write each other three or four times a week.”

I love this, because I am so over e-mail. At any given time, I find myself fifty to a hundred messages behind. If I am especially busy, my in-box swells to five hundred, and it becomes impossible for me to pick out the wheat — a missive from a beloved friend, news of a baby born or a new job, or a fond “remember when” — from all the chaff, the department store sale updates, the sure-fire investment advice, and offers for Internet porn. I try to write letters because I like getting something in the mail besides bills and junk, and I imagine that my friends feel the same. I try to send paper birthday cards for the same reason. I water the gardens of my relationships the best way I know how because, like Julia, I want to have fifty-year-old friendships one day.

What to do, though, about the weeding of such gardens? I cannot let a friendship go. Do not ask me to do it. Sometimes, when I get to the point where I know a friendship must end but I am too jelly-bellied to do it, the universe performs the amputation for me. I move or my friend moves, and there are no hard feelings. But sometimes, a friendship lingers on and on and then what to do?

There is no manual for breaking up with a friend. Therapists, religious leaders, wise women, and elders guide us through the dissolution of romantic relationships and marriage, but there is no high court of friendship to legally and permanently break its bonds. Without this guidance, the ailing friendships in my life break up in fits of pent-up fury and frustration. In the last ten years, I have broken up — or been dumped — by three dear friends. Every case involved tears; hundreds of dollars’ worth of therapy; a film festival of sappy chick flicks; and an elementary school girl’s conviction that if I were prettier, more popular, and less of a “super freak,” the friendship would still be intact. This tremendously mature life view has been highlighted only by the fact that I am highly resistant to change. At every social gathering, my internal MP3 player blasts the same track over and over again: “No new friends. No new friends.” Honestly, I never got the whole “Make new friends, but keep the old. One is silver, and the other’s gold” business. Who wants silver when you’ve got gold?

Lately though, I have been wondering whether this passion I have for my old friends, as flawed as each one of us may be, could be chalked up to something more than my being bullheaded and stubborn. The older I get, the more I value my friends as witnesses to the girl I once was and the young woman I’ll never be again. As my life becomes more settled, I want to look into a friend’s eyes and see the me that danced on top of bars, drove a convertible through the desert in Mexico, and unabashedly wore blue eye shadow on my chocolate brown skin. As I become increasingly comfortable with a certain level of success, I want to hold on to the friends who know how hard I worked to get here, the ones who stop me mid-sentence when my humility veers into a kind of disingenuous, self-flagellating deprecation.

I look around my apartment at the gifts my friends have given me. Treasured books that represent shared passions like Laurie King’s The Beekeeper’s Apprentice, recipes scrawled in familiar handwriting, Depression-era glass found by a friend who has an eye for such things — and I do not want the objects I own to outlast the friendships they sprung from. Which is why during a recent break-up with a friend, I decided no, I could not, did not, want to lose this friend. Maybe we won’t pal around every weekend, maybe we shouldn’t send e-mail every day. But I don’t want to drive the long way around her house. I don’t want to clench my teeth when mutual acquaintances mention her name. She is one of the funniest, smartest, most engaging people I know. And more. To quote Alice Munro, she is a friend of my youth. I want to know her. I want to keep getting to know her, even if it’s from the polite distance of a semiannual cup of tea. I want to be in my nineties, like Julia Child, and be able to reminisce with this woman about the lives that we lived. We may not always get along in the present, but I have never not been fascinated by her stories, her jokes, the way she views the world. So I called her, and I begged her. We are two yolks poured into a bowl, I said. Please. Don’t ask me to unbeat this egg.

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