"There is an absolute sureness to a butcher, whether he is chining lamb chops with a band saw or telling his customer just how to prepare a crown roast," Julie Powell writes in her new memoir, "Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat, and Obsession." "He is more certain of meat than I've ever been about anything."

Uncertain doesn't begin to describe the Powell we find in the entertaining and at times alarming "Cleaving."

The author of "Julie and Julia," having successfully invented herself by conquering Julia Child's "Mastering the Art of French Cooking," now is faced with the pains of a messy marriage made even uglier by an adulterous affair she has with the undeserving "D."

So what does Powell do? What any neurotic writer would: She becomes a butcher.

By securing an apprentice job in a butcher shop to learn the fine points of breaking down animals (something she says she has long had great admiration for), Powell found the perfect metaphor for the blood-and-guts upheaval of her emotional life. Unflinchingly, she lays it all out on the butcher table: her marriage to Eric, as delicate as connective tissue, and a torrid affair with "D," as intoxicating as baked bone marrow.

In the process of cutting things up, Powell wonders how to piece together her bond with Eric, the unsung hero of "Julie and Julia."

It's a journey with many small deaths, quite literally, along the way. Powell is reckless, yes, but also incredibly brave as she cuts through the raw flesh of her marriage, exposing every quivering nerve. It is an evisceration not without its insights and hard-won rewards. It's also funny. Even in her darkest moments, Powell, often with wine glass in hand, finds the humor in the muck. Her fans - the supportive girlfriends and foodie buddies she so easily made blogging the "Julie and Julia" project - will be with her through all the cuts.

The book's joys are many. The butchers who take her in at Fleisher's Grass-Fed & Organic Meats in Kingston, N.Y., are so interesting they make you want to give up your career and take up the cleaver. In this meaty environment, Powell's writing becomes erotic, almost prurient: "The shank comes away in my hand and a lazy drip of clear, silky synovial fluid falls from the end to the ground. I toss the shank to the far end of the table. The inside of the joint's cup is bright white, wet with the lubricating fluid, and impossibly smooth. I can never resist running my fingers, even so briefly, inside that bowl of cartilage."

She spends so much time in the butcher's apron that she even starts comparing her love for D to meat: "When one has eaten a beautiful dry-aged steak, one remembers it, longs for it. That longing doesn't stop."

At some point the reader might worry that Powell, who writes that she is "familiar with the landscape of addiction," has traded one habit-forming behavior (her affair) for another (butchery).

But it is her butcher's journey, which takes her from Fleischer's to South America, Europe and Africa, that eventually focuses her loopy heart. As unsure as the novice butcher is with a knife is how sure Powell is with her pen. In her self-gutting story we see our own fleshy vulnerabilities when it comes to the intricacies of love.