My mother, who I can generously describe as an adequate cook, gave me but one piece of cooking advice in my life: “Julia Child once said, if what you’re cooking turns out to be an utter disaster, simply present to your guests. Never apologize for what you’ve done. People will eat it happily and never comment otherwise.” Needless to say, I had many of mother’s “no apology” meals growing up.

Thus even in my childhood of underseasoned chicken lo meins and watery spaghetti sauces, Julia Child reigned ever present. I was not alone. Across America, people who had attempted no more than tuna-noodle casserole tuned into PBS to learn how to create bouillabaisse a la Marseillaise and boeuf bourguignon. Even today, many have no idea who Thomas Keller, Mario Batali, and Andrew Carmellini are. But Julia Child? All the world fell in love with the oversized cook (please don’t call her a chef) who did more to influence American cuisine than decades of the Food Network. Two new biographies shed light on the master of French cuisine.

In 1969, Nancy Verde Barr was a newlywed, putting her husband through law school when a friend said, “We can’t just sit at home nights while our husbands study.” So she signed up for a cooking class, which led to an infatuation with all things food. In 1980, she assisted at a Planned Parenthood fundraiser where Julia Child gave a cooking demonstration. The two not only hit it off, but Child offered Barr a job as an assistant, beginning a friendship that would last more than twenty years.

Barr’s years with Child culminate with her memoir, Backstage with Julia. It’s a mishmash of her memories, neither chronological nor objective, but they provide an insight into the Julia viewers know and adore. The book is a love letter, a tribute to the cook who inspired and fueled Barr’s cooking passions. At times, the book is intimate and revealing. At others, it gushes, and we are overwhelmed with the minutiae of Child’s life.

Child’s image remains untarnished here. I don’t give anything away when I reveal the most salacious dirt Barr dishes: “Here is the tell-all part of this book,” Barr tantalizes. “Julia Child had a checkered past—with pasta. She didn’t really love it. She never quite understood its pervasive appeal.” 

Barr’s memories are comforting; it’s a relief to discover that the warm, intelligent woman we saw on PBS actually was a warm and intelligent woman. As her director Russ Morash said, “Wysiwyg”; what you see is what you get. According to Barr, “Julia was just as down-to-earth, unpretentious, and unselfconsciously outspoken in the company of friends as she was with the cameras rolling.” Her sense of humor was bawdy, her devotion to her husband was absolute, and she was obsessed with making cooking accessible to the masses. While Barr’s writing is a bit rough around the edges, the glimpse into Child’s private life is reassuring.

In contrast, Laura Shapiro’s biography, Julia Child, is an objective and finely written look at the great cook’s life. Whereas Barr’s memoir begins when Child is already 68, Shapiro begins at the beginning, when Child was an uncertain young woman who wrote on her college application to Smith, “No occupation decided; Marriage preferable.” In a nod to the cliché that the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach, Child (then McWilliams) learned how to cook as a way to woo her future husband, Paul Child, and the result, with her no-nonsense, never-give-up sensibilities, was a one-woman food empire.

Shapiro concentrates primarily on the food. Details of Child’s personal life not directly related to cooking are bypassed. A lump in her breast and a radical mastectomy receive a total of three sentences. But the attention to food is exquisite as is the writing that accompanies it: she writes, Child “would play culinary solos if necessary, but what she really enjoyed was chamber music—everyone on an instrument, chopping garlic or pouring wine or chatting, while a kind of Concerto for Food and Company rose up warm and fragrant in their midst.”

Unlike Barr, Shapiro doesn’t shy away from Child’s darker side. While a staunch supporter of many liberal causes such as abortion rights, Child was at heart an anti-feminist and homophobe. When all-male eating and drinking clubs were forced to accept women, Child protested. The women, she said, will “turn it into a clacking hen house sure enough, and then no one will want to go there.”

Ultimately, though, Shapiro creates a sympathetic portrait, which is only rounded out by Barr’s memoir. Together, the two volumes make for a more complete—and unapologetic—portrait of the woman who changed the way America cooks. Julia wouldn’t have had it any other way.

• Backstage with Julia: My Years with Julia Child by Nancy Verde Barr, Wiley, 304 pages
• Julia Child by Laura Shapiro, Penguin Lives, 208 pages