Maybe you don’t know me, so I’ll tell you this: I write letters to a woman I’ve never met, who isn’t famous, who’s been dead longer than my parents have been alive.  I honestly don’t know too much about her, just some information gleaned from a handful of newspaper articles, some yearbooks, and her obituary.  A couple times a year, Jessi and I put flowers on Leola’s grave and a few other graves in the same cemetery, remembering that we don’t always know who/what blessed us from the past with what we enjoy in the present.  The letters are a way to ruminate on choices and changes and, thus, mostly come up in times of upheaval.  Sometimes they come in moments of joy, when I know I’m grateful and am not sure where to direct the gratitude.

I know that’s a specific brand of weird.

It’s also part of why I loved reading Julie & Julia and The Lost Garden, both of which look at how mentoring can happen between women who never meet.  In the first (obviously, if you’ve been anywhere near a TV/the Internet/whatever), it’s blogger Julie Powell and Julia Child; in the latter, a novel, it’s Gwen and Virginia Woolf.

You can imagine how excited I was for the movie.

On Sunday, after the disaster that was Dave Matthews, I went to an afternoon showing of Julie & Julia with Mom.  I was a little worried because of the reviews I’d read.  Of course Meryl Streep as Julia Child was going to be amazing; you didn’t even need to see the previews to know that.  (Dear Meryl Streep, run for president, save the world.  Love, Amy)  The critics all had beef with the character of Julie Powell.  It was nothing against Amy Adams; they said she did the best with what she was given.

I loved it anyway.  The critics can go fuck themselves.

I’ve never been one to use statements like the movie hit really close to home.  Generally, even when they might (see being seventeen, nuts, and watching Girl, Interrupted), they don’t.

For the year and some change between the first and second rounds of grad school, I worked retail and then I temped.  Even during my crazy teen time or when I first went to college did I cry as much, as hard, or as often as during that year.  I had worked so hard to dig myself out of academic graves, I had put all my heart into several activities, and it still wasn’t good enough.  I’ve never hated myself so much or felt so incredibly useless.  That year was the only time in my life where supervisors micromanaged me, where just about everyone I encountered treated me like I was too dumb to function.  There was no guarantee that the year in hell would yield grad school round two; there was no guarantee about anything other than how badly it all sucked, no matter what I did to try to resolve it.

I wrote to Leola a lot during that time, trying desperately to make meaning out of the situation.

As was much the same for Julie Powell, blogging her way through Mastering the Art of French Cooking.  It’s so much easier to place those anxieties on a tangible project, to take guidance from a distant figure who you can pretend is your own.  As incredibly amazing as Julia Child’s story is, it just doesn’t ring the same way with me.

Some things in the movie would be great, regardless of the characters.  Two women, working their way through their ambitions, both of whom have loving, supportive husbands.  That right there is just fantastic.  Which is why Roger Ebert’s analysis of the situation really bothered me: “But if the men had been portrayed as more high-spirited, it might have taken on intriguing dimensions. Both husbands are, frankly, a little boring: They’ve been assigned their supporting roles in their marriages and are reluctant to question the singlemindedness of their wives.”

That’s funny.  Usually that’s what people say about women in movies about men.  So, here you go, Ebert: the movie is not about the husbands.  It’s about the women.

And it feels wonderful.

I actually haven’t felt this good about a movie since the first time I saw Fried Green Tomatoes (speaking of women mentoring other women and being at a losing point in life).

I still don’t know what’s going to happen to my future.  All of the tears that dried over the past year came right back as if they never stopped as I clicked my way through Craigslist.  Sometimes, I’ll be sitting, reading, watching TV, writing, whatever and my breath will catch before my mind realizes why.  Because finishing this degree doesn’t necessarily translate into anything.  In two years, I could be back to retail/temp work all over again.  And that petrifies me.  But every morning I’m not in that situation, I wake up grateful.  No matter how hard a class is, no matter how much a classmate irritates me, I’m grateful that it’s not that other world.

So I understand you, Julie Powell, and the need to create something out of nothing to quiet how very loud that nothing is.