I am a writer, graphic designer, and artist. In addition to Perfection I have written essays and commentary for publications including The New York Times, The Huffington Post, Hemispheres, Glamour, and mrbellersneighborhood. I received a MacDowell Fellowship in 2008 where I completed work on Perfection and began work on a novel. I live in Brooklyn, N.Y.
I am a born and raised New Yorker. I grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan during the 1960s and 70s, before it got fancy. I still miss the old neighborhood and the marigold yellow kitchen of my childhood where I did most of my homework on the kitchen table—round, white, Formica.
I often forget names but I never forget a face.
As a young child I attended a Waldorf School and I credit these years with supporting my creative drive. Later I switched to a private girls school on the Upper East Side, quite the opposite kind of environment, though I still found a refuge in the art room. I did not love my middle and high school years but we did learn how to write. I took Latin for six years and still regret that I didn’t study harder.
I have always been a letter writer, which is how PERFECTION began.
I love cats, even the scraggly ones. I used to pick up sad strays, but now we have two and that’s plenty. I get to know dogs one at a time, but I think there might be one in my future...
I love to dance and I think I’m pretty good at it. It’s a time when my natural shyness fades away.
Some other jobs I’ve had in my life: summer babysitter, art class model, envelope stuffer, restaurant dishwasher, canvasser for the failed ERA Amendment, paste-up artist in the advertising department at Carnegie Hall, junior staff designer at Harper & Row Publishers, freelance designer before computers. The most challenging and rewarding job I’ve had is being a mother, because the job description changes every day.
I am the world’s biggest skeptic, but try me.
It is impossible to put PERFECTION down as we follow Julie Metz through her true story of love, lies, loss, and moving forward. Her raw and brave writing makes you want to cheer Metz on as she pieces her life back together, one beautiful sentence at a time.
PERFECTION is a nuanced, spellbinding portrait of an extraordinarily complex marriage. Julie Metz has written a literary page-turner that is at once entertaining and moving.
Six months after her husband's funeral, Julie Metz discovered his five mistresses, one of them her presumed friend. She writes, "I couldn’t kill Henry anymore, since he was, conveniently enough, dead.” The seed of PERFECTION was rage, yet Metz’s fury is not ugly, not even vengeful. Instead it provides this book’s beautiful testimony that, instead of killing the subject, the author can do something that diminishes him even more totally. She can forgive him and move on. That accomplishment, via prose, leaves me breathless.
