Kaitlyn Alexander drove from Cherry Hill in a pounding rain, got soaked looking for a parking space, but arrived in Center City in time to get Julie Powell's autograph.

To Alexander, a 19-year-old marketing major at the University of Delaware who aspires to go into food marketing, Powell is success personified.

Given the fairy-tale nature of Powell's sudden rise from low-level temp to high-profile memoirist practically overnight, her story was bound to become a major motion picture.

Surely you've heard the buzz about Julie & Julia, opening Aug. 7 at a theater near you.

The film dramatizes the 2002-03 blog and 2005 book in which Powell, now 36, chronicled the year she spent cooking every cassoulet, clafoutis, and quenelle (stew, flan, and molded puree) in Mastering the Art of French Cooking, the 1961 classic with which Julia Child changed this country's culinary landscape.

Director Nora Ephron delivers "two true stories" by juxtaposing Powell's "you never know what you can accomplish until you try" story line with Child's similar transformation some 50 years earlier as told in My Life in France by Child and her grandnephew Alex Prud'homme (Knopf, 2006).

Child died in 2004 at the age of 91, without ever encountering her devotee.

But Powell was at Borders in Center City in June signing paperback copies of Julie & Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen. That's where Alexander and other fans were rewarded with autographs.

Later, at lunch, Powell sampled champagne-and-melon soup at Beau Monde in Bella Vista and mused on the cost of celebrity.

No, she's not kvetching about the film's lineup of Academy Award winners and nominees. Ephron wrote the screenplay and directed the film. Meryl Streep plays the high-pitched Child to the hilt, and adorable Amy Adams is the wide-eyed Powell.

("I first thought of Kate Winslet because she's not teeny-tiny," says the voluptuous Powell.)

Of course, she's happy with the money. She's not in line for a percentage of the film's gross. But Powell has been more than paid back for the extra $250 or so a week she spent on ingredients during her year of cooking endlessly - enough to buy a weekend home in the Catskills.

Powell's was perhaps the first food blog to garner a six-figure book contract. Her subsequent magazine articles earned her two James Beard awards. Her innate determination was at last seen as an asset, and the revealing intimacy with which she told her story was commended as "courageous."

All good things.

But the cooking, blogging, memoir-writing, sudden attention, and, above all, those intimate revelations, challenged her psyche and her marriage, not to mention her waistline.

Even as the hardcover edition of J&J was in pre-publication, Powell says, she had an "insane, irresistible affair" with a former chum. (Her previous encounter with that man, while only a one-nighter in college, had been something of a scandal, too, because she was practically engaged to her future husband, Eric, at the time.)

And how do we know all this?

The ever-more-revealing Powell detailed a sadomasochistic affair with "D" in Behind the Bedroom Door. The book, compiled by Self magazine articles director Paula Derrow, is a collection of true sex stories by 26 accomplished women writers.

She even mused about her six-month marital separation and reconciliation in a 2006 New York Times Magazine article accompanied by a recipe for Garlic Soup With Poached Eggs.

Losing those couple of extra pounds was a snap.

Still, what's a girl to do when her marriage plummets in direct proportion to her skyrocketing success?

Powell describes herself as project-oriented, meaning that when something in life is troubling or difficult, she works through it (or tries to make it go away) by being otherwise obsessed.

On the heels of her first success, Powell needed another all-consuming project - one that would send her to Argentina, snag a book contract, and perhaps result in another major motion picture.

Powell threw herself into mastering the art of butchery (yes, there's more than one metaphor at play here).

She apprenticed at Fleisher's Grass-Fed and Organic Meats in Kingston, N.Y., sought the solace of fellow butchers in South America, Europe and Africa, and hardly gave those afternoon trysts with D another thought.

The result is Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat and Obsession, due out in December.

"It's a darker book about a darker time," she says. "In Julie & Julia, the marital-distress factor is seething under the surface. In Cleaving, it becomes clear."

"I'd been with Eric since I was 18. We married when I was 24. All of a sudden [in Julie & Julia], I'm in my 30s and realizing that the way we've been married has not changed as we've grown. It needed a complete rejiggering, and that started this whole sort of dark period in our marriage."

She accepts her actions as fated.

"My feeling on the past five years is that there's not much I would have or could have done differently. I think it was necessary."

Now, though, Powell says she is "determined to get out of the memoiring game - at least, until I have 10 more years of life experience."

She is writing fiction (no hints). "And if that doesn't sell, I'll have to get a real job."

"I know I won the success lottery," she says. "It's amazing and wonderful and one can only assume my life is going to go downhill from here."

Contact staff writer Dianna Marder at 215-854-4211 or dmarder@phillynews.com. Read her recent work at http://go.

philly.com/diannamarder.