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‘Julie & Julia’ writer Julie Powell dies

The woman who tried to cook every recipe from Julia Child’s “Mastering the Art of French Cooking,” and who documented her efforts online, has died.

Julie Powell was 49.

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Powell wrote about her successes and failures in her popular 2002 food blog called the Julie/Julia Project, which inspired the movie, “Julie & Julia.”

The film starred Meryl Streep as Child and Amy Adams as Powell.

Powell’s husband said his wife died of cardiac arrest, The New York Times reported.

Powell, according to the newspaper, “was an aspiring writer working at a low-level administrative job in Lower Manhattan.”

At nearly 30, she had no other option, calling the project “one of those panicked, backed-into-a-corner kind of moments” when she spoke with the Times.

To do something with her time, she decided to cook each of the 524 recipes from the first volume of Child’s cookbook that was handed down to her from her mother.

She shared her successes and challenges while cooking in a Long Island City loft apartment.

Before the anniversary of the blog’s launch, and her self-imposed deadline of trying to cook all 524 recipes, she had 400,000 total page views, a milestone in the infancy of blogging, and had thousands of regular readers, the Times reported.

The blog became a book, “Julie & Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen,” and the paperback version “Julie & Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously,” which sold more than a million copies.

When talking to Salon.com, she said that the blog was not only about the food, but the journey the year brought to her because she made the choice to do something.

“I had this profound sense that making a choice I was going to have to stick to was like a prison sentence, a condemnation. And later, frankly, I sometimes even thought about the project that way. But at least it was my choice. Ultimately I think we get so scared that our choices are not going to lead where they need to, and we’re not going to have the right husband or the right career, that we just don’t make any choices at all. For me the idea of making my own choice and seeing it through to the end — even though there was no logical reason to do it — wound up being a freeing thing rather than a constraining thing,” Powell told Salon in 2005.

The film inspired by the book was written and directed by Nora Ephron and was Ephron’s last film before she died.