What a rare and refreshing treat it is when an 80-year-old memoirist looks back unsentimentally, candidly, intelligently, with gusto and humor, at a long, happy, self-determined life of love and work and pleasure and success. “My Life in France” (Alfred A. Knopf, 322 pages, $25.95), by Julia Child (with Alex Prud’homme), is above all else a love story, not only of Julia’s decades-long, deeply happy marriage to Paul Child, but also of her passionate affair with food, France, and “cookery-bookery,” as she calls her life’s work.

When I first cracked the book open, I knew very little about Julia beyond my childhood memory of the tall, comical woman with a quavery voice who hacked up chickens and whipped up elaborate sauces on television. I’d always assumed that her cookbook, “Mastering the Art of French Cooking,” was intended for serious amateur chefs, not self-taught seat-of-the-pants improvisation-and-alchemy cooks like me. The words “Julia Child” meant those fancy, difficult, snooty cooking techniques of la cuisine francaise – I thought she’d been born with the esoteric secrets of sauce bearnaise and beurre blanc.

I soon learned otherwise. “My Life in France” opens in 1948: Julia was “a six-foot-two-inch, thirty-six-year-old, rather loud and unserious Californian” who could barely boil an egg. Her husband, Paul Child, a well-traveled bon vivant and gourmet, had politely choked down her culinary efforts since the beginning of their marriage, in 1946. When Paul, a photographer and painter who worked for the Foreign Service, was posted to Paris, the Childs set up housekeeping at 81 rue de l’Universite, or, as they called it, Roo de Loo, an inauspicious-sounding address that was nonetheless the birthplace of the Julia Child we know and love – or will love after reading this memoir.

Julia gradually and profoundly awakened to the fact that her true life’s calling, which until then had eluded her, was French cuisine. Newly arrived in Paris, still wet behind the ears, she ventured to the markets and bought groceries with her minimal schoolgirl French, then tried to create meals for Paul in their kitchen with its “one-foot square oven, barely usable to heat plates or make toast” and “four-foot shallow soapstone sink with no hot water.” In this poorly equipped scullery, a spark ignited, caught fire, and flamed up into a massive bonfire of ambition and excitement: Little by little, through determination born of newfound passion, with the help of French lessons and trial and error over the stove, Julia soon found that marketing and cooking had become the chief pleasures of her days. She began to live to cook.

Most women would have stopped there, happy to throw the occasional great dinner party, but Julia wasn’t most women. As her cooking improved, she began to try to perfect recipes on her own, such as homard a l’americaine, a live lobster, cut up – “it dies immediately,” Julia reassures us cheerfully – and simmered in wine, tomato, garlic, and herbs. Instinctively, she was already working toward some future in cooking, but what that was, she didn’t yet know.

It didn’t take long for Julia to exhaust her cookbooks. In 1949 she enrolled at the Cordon Bleu cooking school and showed up every day at dawn in a basement classroom to study under the tutelage of chef Rene Bugnard, the school’s eminence grise, a former apprentice to the legendary chef l’Escoffier. Julia’s fellow classmates were 11 American GIs, there under the GI Bill of Rights, all hoping to open golf-club restaurants and roadhouses when they got back home.” In my cold-eyed view there wasn’t an artist in the bunch,” she says of them.

The Cordon Bleu provided entree into the world of epicureanism in France; while Julia learned to cook, Paul learned about wine, and soon both Childses had joined epicurean guilds and entered the social whirl of French eating and drinking. These guild dinner parties led Julia to Louisette Bertholle and Simone Beck (nicknamed Simca), who would, with Julia, form Julia’s Gourmettes guild. At the time, Louisette and Simca were writing a French cookbook together, or trying to. The Three Gourmettes began giving cooking lessons together, and it wasn’t long before Julia was roped into the cookbook writing.

It was Julia’s revolutionary idea that the book’s primary aim was “to present the fundamentals of classical French cooking in sufficient detail that any loving amateur could produce a perfect French meal.” Louisette’s contribution was primarily social; she knew everyone in the French food world. But, being a harried wife and mother, she had little time for writing and recipe testing, so it was Julia and Simca who, over the course of eight or nine years of unbelievably diligent labor, together produced the meticulously researched, brilliantly written, groundbreaking “Mastering the Art of French Cooking.”

The story of the writing and publishing of this major work of cookery-bookery constitutes the heart of “My Life in France.” It’s an enthralling and suspenseful account of the ups and downs “Mastering” suffered on its way to publication, the amount of sheer labor that went into it, the typing and cooking and experimenting, the letters back and forth from Simca to Julia, the rewriting and retyping, the re-cooking. Although Julia is diplomatic and loving in all her descriptions of her friend Simca, it’s not difficult to read between the lines and conclude that Simca was extremely difficult to work with – slapdash and condescending – and altogether an enormous pain in the ass. No matter. The book, after two major revisions and three different publishers, finally came out to immense acclaim in October 1961. Julia became, practically overnight, a culinary star in America.

Just as Julia’s Cordon Bleu course and teaching led to her great cookbook, her book tour, which included TV interviews and public cooking classes, led to the TV career that made her a household name. After Paul retired early from the Foreign Service, the Childs settled in Cambridge, Mass., in a house they bought in 1959. In the mid-1960s, they built a beautiful, airy country house, La Pitchoune, on Simca’s estate in Provence. For the next 30 years they spent all the time they could at “La Peetch.” Meanwhile, Julia had her TV show, more books; Paul became her assistant and photographer. The three things Julia loved most, cooking, France, and her husband, had all come together. It was a fruitful time, but, from Julia’s description, it sounds far from mellow: a mad dash around France to shoot footage of great culinary artisans for a TV special, house guests, dinner parties, TV shows to tape, trips back and forth across the Atlantic.

Julia Child’s life story makes for riveting reading: Her voice is casual and breezy, warm and friendly, peppered with exclamations like “Yum!” and “Ouf!” She describes herself as a big-boned California girl, and it shows – she narrates unpretentiously, warmly and frankly, with a flair for the dramatic. Her voice emerges as distinctively and enthusiastically as that of the very tall woman I remember on television. This, I suspect, is thanks in some part to Mr. Prud’homme, Paul Child’s nephew, who organized and amassed into book form a heap of letters by both Paul and Julia, Julia’s journals, and his own notes of their conversations – the tape recorder bothered her, so he stopped using it. In his role as editor, he provided some connective tissue between anecdotes, and it’s impossible to tell where; the book is edited seamlessly and unobtrusively. And photographs, most of them Paul Child’s, illustrate the book throughout, like punctuation in the flow of the story rather than big clumps stuck in the middle.

At the poignant end of the book, Julia is 80 (she died almost 12 years later, just shy of 92). Ninety-year-old Paul now lives in a nursing home, and La Peetch is being closed up forever and given back to Simca’s heirs. Meanwhile, Simca has died, as have many of Julia’s closest friends and contemporaries. When Julia’s niece, Phila, in the midst of helping her pack up the house forever, begins to weep with sadness that this era is over, Julia tells her, “I’ve always felt that when I’m done with something I just walk away from it – fin!”

But luckily for us, she was willing to revisit all of it. I closed the book feeling moved to tears by Julia’s sturdy genius, good-hearted perfectionism, and practical and visionary fervor. Her story ends the only way it possibly could, with a heartfelt “toujours bon appetit!”

Ms. Christensen is the author of three novels, most recently “The Epicure’s Lament,” available from Doubleday.