After having cooked her way through Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking in Julie and Julia, what would Julie Powell do next? Learn to be a butcher.
In Cleaving she sets about this in fabulously funny and often grisly detail. She trains at Fleischer's, a butcher shop where she buries herself in the details of food. She learns how to break down a side of beef and French a rack of ribs – tough, physical work - and how to get on with her extraordinary new colleagues.
As she does so, she exposes with her butcher's knife the other side to her life, for Julie peels back the skin to reveal that she is in the throes of an insane, irresistible love affair that threatens to devastate her marriage. In this riveting memoir of love, marriage and meat, a voyage into the world of butchery becomes a metaphor for learning to stand on one's own two feet.