The Failure Pledge

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Julia Child

Julia Child in her kitchen, 1978.
1978. She did not cook seriously until she was thirty-six.Lynn Gilbert. CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

What failed

She was fired at twenty-six, turned down by two branches of the armed services for her height, and spent the war in clerical posts with the OSS, starting as a typist in Washington and ending as head of its registry in China. She did not cook seriously until thirty-six, failed her diploma exam at thirty-eight, then spent most of the 1950s on a manuscript her publisher finally refused.

What happened next

Her agent sent the rejected manuscript to Knopf, where Judith Jones took it. It was published when she was forty-nine, and a television appearance turned into a cooking show at fifty that ran ten years.

The point

The rejection was not wrong about the book — it was enormous and demanding. She was right that it should not be made smaller. The eight years were not preparation for the work; they were the work.

The sequence

4 documented failures, shown with the successes in between. Every entry carries its own source — the wins are part of the record, and leaving them out is how these stories get distorted.

  1. 1939

    Fired for insubordination over a mix-up with a document.

    failureJulia Child (National Women's History Museum)

  2. 1942

    Rejected by both the WAVES and the WACs for being too tall.

    failureJulia Child (National Women's History Museum)

  3. 1951

    Fails the Cordon Bleu practical exam at thirty-eight.

    failureSacre Cordon Bleu! The cooking-school exam that ate Julia Child (Alex Prud'homme)

  4. 1958

    Six years into the manuscript, she writes to Avis DeVoto in capitals, asking why they ever decided to do it.

    noteAs Always, Julia (The Marginalian)

  5. 1959

    Houghton Mifflin rejects the book after nearly eight years' work.

    failureAs Always, Julia (The Marginalian)

  6. 1961

    Mastering the Art of French Cooking is published. She is forty-nine.

    successAs Always, Julia (The Marginalian)

  7. 1963

    The French Chef becomes a regular series. She is fifty.

    successJulia Child (Wikipedia)

Sources

  • A Julia-worthy feast (Harvard Gazette)
    her failure on the school's final exam (she ultimately passed, graduating in 1951)
  • As Always, Julia (The Marginalian)
    Mastering the Art of French Cooking was finally published on October 16, 1961.
  • Child, Julia Carolyn (Encyclopedia.com)
    In January 1952 Child and two French friends, Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle, opened a tiny cooking school for Americans. The school, called L’Ecole des Trois Gourmandes, was located in Child’s kitchen. At about this time Child was also examining a manuscript on which the other two women had been working—a French cookbook for Americans.
  • Publishing a first book: Julia Child's long road (ContentMeant)
    After much deliberation, Child agreed to cut it back, but — though highly praised by the editor — the resulting manuscript, submitted in September 1959 was ultimately deemed too “encyclopedic.”
  • Julia Child (Wikipedia)
    She began her OSS career as a typist at its headquarters in Washington, D.C., but, because of her education and experience, was soon given a position as a top-secret researcher working directly for the head of OSS, General William J. Donovan.
  • Julia Child (Wikipedia)
    She was later posted to Kunming, China, where she received the Emblem of Meritorious Civilian Service as head of the Registry of the OSS Secretariat.

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