Julie Powell, posing for a portrait with butcher knives in November 2009, has written a a book called Cleaving. (Carlo Allegri/Associated Press)

Julie Powell at 30 was living a life she thought doomed to mediocrity as she spent her leisure hours cooking all 2,400 recipes from Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

As she cooked, she blogged, in a phenomenon that became first an internet success, then a book, then a movie, Julie & Julia, starring Meryl Streep and Amy Adams.

Powell became wealthy and well-known, gave up her dead-end job and, as she tells it, "fell over the edge of an abyss."

Her new book, Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat and Obsession, released in November 2009, tells about how cut up her old life, first by taking up butchering, then by starting a disastrous affair.

"My life was so much more free and open than what I'd done before — no job, having money," she told CBC's Q cultural affairs show in an interview Tuesday from New York. "There was this freedom and it would begin to feel like freefall — I didn't know what I was doing."

She'd been with her husband, Eric Powell, since she was 18, yet she took up with another man she identifies only as "D" in Cleaving.

At the same time, she set out to find a butcher who would take her as an apprentice, so she could learn the art of cutting meat.

"Butchery and the affair were two sides of the same coin," she said. "I was throwing rocks at the windows of my house and breaking things apart." She was confused and without focus throughout this stage of her life.

Powell is unapologetic about showing herself behaving badly. Critics have already come down on her for telling too much about how infatuated she became with another man and how much she hurt her husband.

She says she consulted with Eric and he encouraged her to write the book. The writing process ended up being therapeutic.

"As a person who uses her personal life for creative fodder, I think people who do that do it because the writing process becomes really vital to understanding our experiences and what they mean," she said.

The many changes in her life forced her to crack open her marriage "and look what's inside to see what's worth saving."

The Powell that emerges in her second memoir is very unlike the perky, sweet-natured Julie portrayed by Adams in the film version of her first book.

"Even though everything in Julie & Julia is very authentic to our marriage at the time, it's a very sentimental, lovely simple vision of marriage," Powell said. "That's what I thought it was at the time. Then experiences I've had since then are giving the lie to that.

"In a way, I didn't want everybody holding this prettified version of our marriage up and saying, 'Oh, you're so lucky.'"

She's not expecting Nora Ephron to call any time soon to make a rom-com of Cleaving. As for the butchery, it turned out to be quite different from what she expected.

"It's a delicate art and there's a zen side to practising it," Powell said. "That made it a sort of haven in the midst of this confusion."

Powell said she's through with memoirs for the moment. Her next work will be fiction.