Keeping the Feast: One Couple's Story of Love, Food, and Healing

Move over Elizabeth Gilbert. This is one tender story of one couple's sojourn in Italy and its healing power on their marriage. Not since Vanauken's A Severe Mercy has such a wonderful celebration of marriage been presented. A sweet, gentle read.

Lou Grant famously told Mary Richards that he hated spunk. Had he really meant it, I'm guessing he wouldn't have cared for Paula Butturini, because spunk is one of the many attributes she possesses, along with enormous reserves of courage, tenacity, and faith. Her memoir recounts a period in her life that would have caused many of us to simply give in and say that reality is far too cruel. Ms. Butturini somehow survived, as this moving book recounts in great detail. The story is mainly set in Europe as the author and her husband attempt to pursue joint careers in newspaper journalism. In excruciatingly short order, they meet with physical and emotional nightmares that lead to years of darkness in their personal and professional lives. Through it, they forge on (sometimes by an eyelash), often relying on the binding quality of The Family Meal to provide moments of normalcy. The role that food plays throughout Ms. Butturini's life is explored as the setting jumps back to her childhood in Connecticut, forward to good times and bad in Italy, and finally to her current home in France. I found it impossible not to be deeply moved as I learned of all that her family went through and how she came to realize there were ways to confront pain and suffering without feeling guilty over one's own anguish. Her firsthand experiences of dealing with loved ones' battles with recurring depression were harrowing and instructive. Truly, the loving, sumptuous descriptions of Italian food are just a bonus to the real story of a remarkable family's fight to survive. Keeping the Feast moved me and I highly recommend it.

Paula Butturini has written a moving account of the physical injuries she and her husband John sustained in their work as journalists and the long and sometimes excruciating work it took for both of them, but John in particular, to recover their physical and emotional health. Paula and John's love of cooking and the rhythms of everyday life in Rome helped them heal. Butturini also reminisces throughout the book about her Italian-American upbringing and her difficult, yet loving relationship with her mother. Paula and John had the good fortune to have a wide and supportive group of friends, understanding employers and an enviable European lifestyle. Butturini writes extensively about her love of cooking, but she has the honesty to admit in the end, that as she grows older her enthusiasm is starting to lag. This was a touching and interesting book with two parallel story lines. One is the story of John and Paula's mother's emotional struggles; the other is how cooking and an enjoyment of good food (and friends) can help overcome life's inevitable adversities.

"Keeping the Feast" is Paula Butturini's moving account of several years in the mid-1990's when she and her new husband were struck by a series of personal disasters and how they healed themselves. Butturini and her husband, John Tagliabue, met in Rome in the late 1980's when they were both foreign correspondents, she for UPI and he for the New York Times. Both were American-born, but of Italian parentage. They fell in love, both with Rome and with each other, and married after a four year courtship. However, soon after their wedding, Tagliabue was shot and wounded while in Romania, covering the fall of Communism. He spent many months recovering from his devastating physical wounds and then fell into a deep, on-going depression which did not seem to be helped by medication. For three years, Butturini helped her wounded in body and in spirit husband recover. She did so by love and attention, but also by cooking the wonderful Italian foods she had eaten as a child. And after the bad times were over, and she had a new baby, the cooking continued. It's hard to know just how much the food helped Tagliabue, but shopping, preparing, and cooking certainly helped them both cope with their on-going struggles. This is a lovely, hopeful book. Butturini writes about her own family and the Italian customs they observed when she was growing up in Connecticut. It's a short book, but very loving account of a few very bad years and how - maybe - one can be comforted by love and food.

The author chronicles her life shortly before and after she and her husband received brutal treatment when covering various European assignments. She was brutally beaten when caught in some protests and he was shot while traveling. His injuries required many surgeries and then while healing he fell into a horrible depression. The book provides the author a chance to reflect on her and her husband's life and how it so tragically changed after these events. What is unique about this book, is that she has interwoven her relationship with food into their personal story. Each of us has a relationship with food. It can be as simple as remembering favorites as children, family traditional meals, stories about meals or lore about certain foods that have been passed down. It also can be the rituals of preparing a special meal or even a daily one. Sometimes buying and preparing food where they lived in Italy was so interwoven into the community that it provided a haven for Paula when everything else seemed to be coming apart. . This reminded me a bit of Frances Mayes book; "Under the Tuscan Sun" where the author recounted stories of her life and home restoration along with stories of Italy and its wonderful food. However this book does not provide recipes, nor is as light-hearted. This is a story of survival and there food is integral. As difficult as the subject matter is, this book reads easily and is very well-written, but it does not candy-coat, the long road of depression. What it does do, is show how the little things in life, the support of good friends, the importance of work and the community around the kitchen table can start to draw those separated from life by anxiety and depression back from the abyss. I enjoyed the fact that the story weaves back and forth from the current day, to times past where the author mused on an aspect of her past and then showed how it was pertinent. This is how most of us think and it caused me to think of many things in my own life that food played a big part in as well as some of my family traditions. While reading this book, I could not help think of the path all of us take when faced with adversity or illness. We want to do the right things. Sometimes solutions are not apparent and sometimes they change from time to time. This is one couple's path and what worked for them. What to me was most notable was the understanding and impetus to change, when things weren't working. Sometimes that can be the hardest thing to do, as you don't always have the big picture. Hind sight is 20:20 and when you are in the middle the path is not so obvious. Congratulations Paula. I'm sure the road ahead still has many bumps, but this book helps pave over some of the old ones.