Getting at the marrow of human nature

Following the enormous success of her first memoir, "Julie and Julia," Julie Powell finds herself unmoored. She is no longer tethered to her secretarial job, and the world has begun to open up in ways she never could have predicted. Yet she was surprised to find herself still seeking ... something. "It was confusing and distressing to find myself, so soon after that whirlwind year came to a close, more or less where I'd been before. ... I could not, without seeming churlish and ungrateful, deny my good fortune, the money and job offers and a book contract, the fans and friends and of course the devoted husband. ... So why did it all feel like ... I don't know, like cheating, somehow?"

At the heart of this second memoir is Powell's dual journey. On the surface, she sets out to become a butcher. She finds an apprenticeship at a butcher shop, where she spends a few days a week breaking down a side of beef or conquering her fear of the sausage machine. She finds comfort here among a gregarious group that shares her sense of humor and easily welcomes her into the family.

But the more powerful journey in the memoir is an intimate one. Powell's marriage is in crisis and for two years she has been having an affair with a man she calls "D." All parties are aware of the situation, and shortly after discovering her affair, her husband, Eric, embarks on a relationship with another woman, with Powell's blessing.

The situation is complicated on a number of levels, but Powell's nuanced and articulate storytelling illuminates those sticky places where love and desire can tangle one up in a confusing mess of emotion.

In more ways than one, "Cleaving" is not for the faint of heart. Powell's descriptions of tearing through muscle and filament with the flash of a blade are exhaustive in detail. You can nearly hear the slap of flesh on the table or smell the tinny odor of blood.

So, too, are her descriptions of her lustful, nearly obsessive thoughts about D, as well as the intense connection she shares with Eric. Her friend Gwen doesn't understand why Powell and Eric persevere, why they don't get a divorce. Powell writes, "'A clean break.' ... As if we were just cracking open a joint. As if we could just apply enough pressure, push hard enough, and come loose from each other with a satisfying pop and a slow, clean drip. She, our closest friend, doesn't quite realize that we're one thing, Eric and I. ... One bone. You can't snap a bone in two with a delicious pop. You have to hack, saw, destroy."

This isn't the sanitized version of Julie Powell we saw in her first memoir. Here she lays herself bare. She is a flawed woman, a flawed wife, who drinks too much wine and seeks inappropriate companionship. But she is also brave and loving, passionate and complex.

At the end of "Cleaving," Powell isn't compelled to tidy up the scrappy ends or even give the reader a clear sense of what is to come. She leaves it much as it started, raw and unfinished, like marriage and life itself. Kim Schmidt has written reviews for the Christian Science Monitor and Publishers Weekly. She lives in Illinois.