Cleaving: A Story about Marriage, Meat and Obsession, Julie Powell. After all the fame of Julie & Julia, an old flame reappears back into Julie’s life and she picks up where she left off in college, begins an affair with her husband completely aware. Then her husband goes and has an affair. While all that lack of marriage is going down, she decides she wants to learn to be butcher. She does. Neither the affair nor the meat disturbs me (for most that would be), but it is how the book just feels fake. It feels like she uses the affair for a story and happens to throw another storyline of butchering, which at time correlates too well. I feel that she is spending the whole time justifying her affair to “reclaim” herself back from her new life of recognition. I do not know, and I was not impressed. I found her writing style annoying and a little needy, I felt the same with J&J but the voiced worked for that memoir.