Customer Reviews

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

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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.

Choosing, cooking, eating, and savoring food is the constant in this memoir. Paula Butturini and her husband met while they were both reporters in Italy. The years they spent together there were golden - good food, good friends and interesting work that included travel in eastern Europe as the iron curtain crumbled. Butturini writes: "I loved John because, like me, he liked to cook as much as he liked to eat, because both of us grew up in homes where honest food was the central magnet that brought us all to the same table two or three times a day."

Their lives took a sudden and traumatic turn after Paula was beaten by Czechoslovakian riot police in Prague in 1989 just weeks before their wedding. Weeks after the wedding, her husband John was shot in Romania and nearly died. Butturini writes very openly about the depression that threatened to destroy her husband as he recovered. Though it is painful to read of John's depression, and of Butturini's mother's depression, the support that the couple's family and friends provided to them is heartening.

Butturini made a decision to do whatever it took to help her husband recover, and after moving them back to Italy fed both his body and his heart with the simple but fresh foods that had been the backdrop of their first years together. She is open in this memoir about her own struggles, including her anger, as the months went by, sometimes with little or no improvement in her husband's depression.

Butturini was told, and came to understand, that trauma changes life irrevocably, and healing involves accepting this painful truth. Though it is a bit of a cliche, this is a heartwarming story of building a new life after trauma and relying on the love of friends and family.

Paula Butturini's memoir Keeping the Feast is more than a true story about a couple's enduring love set among a delicious Italian background full of food and flavor; it's a story of hope, and the bond of family, and the anguish of a person helplessly afflicted with depression.

Paula met her second husband John in Italy. They married when she was in her late thirties. Both news correspondents, both with strong Italian-family backgrounds, Paula and John were meant for each other, and their love endured trials many of us cannot fathom. In 1989 Paula was beaten senseless by riot police in Czechoslovakia, just weeks before her and John are to be married. Barely surviving her own trauma, it is only a handful of weeks later when John is shot by a sniper in Romania. Undergoing several surgeries, John barely survives. The couple land back in Italy to recoup, only John suffers a devastating depression that threatens to tear their marriage apart. Paula takes refuge in her Italian markets, diving into her family recipes, the ingredients which held her together as a child as she hopes they can hold her family together now.

Keeping the Feast is marketed as a memoir about the tribulations a couple goes through, and how food kept them together. But I can't help but look beyond the ingrediants, the never-ending succulent lists of Italian market-wares and herbs. Paula's own mother suffered from depression, it was something Paula herself feared her whole life. To have her husband, the love of her life, afflicted by the same disease, was terrifying and my heart goes out to her. Not everyone understands the crippling devastation that is depression, the way it can leach into your life, but Paula did, she saw it first hand and she vowed to never let it bury her. She dealt with her husband's depression, first with silent fear, and then with anger and outrage, and even though he suffered it more than once in their life together, he always recovered, and she was always there.

Keeping The Feast is a heartbreaking, beautiful memoir of the strength of family devotion, tied together by the delicious façade of Italian ruins, and the mouth-watering dishes of Italian food. I thank Paula for sharing her story, and hope we can all be as strong.

It sounds like an idyllic life. Two journalists share a love of Italy and food, they get their dream jobs, they have amazing friends with homes in amazing places who invite them to stay for months on end...and then tragedy hits and it all goes wrong. Paula Butterini is on assignment in Czechoslovakia, where she is arrested and beaten by the police during the 1989 riots. A few weeks later, her husband John is hit by sniper fire while in Rumania and is nearly killed. Paula pulls herself together, but John's wounds are deeper that we first realize. He becomes depressed to the point of losing his ability to speak, his walking is robotlike, he avoids people. For years, Paula's fun-loving husband becomes submerged in a depression that seens incurable. Doctor after doctor, treatment after treatment, and city after city make no difference. Paula's feelings run the gamut from terror to rage. But always, there is her food, her cooking, her solace. She buries herself in cooking the way other's might lose themselves in drink. John's recovery takes a long time...through the birth and first five years of their daughter's life. His employers amazingly keep him in jobs of sorts as a reporter, and friends supply accommodations. But it's hardly dolce far niente. You can almost feel Paula willing John to recover. This is a woman who does not give up. She has a child with a man who is so lost to her and to himself, he can barely speak to her. She brings the child of his previous marriage back into his life. His depression does not stop her from creating a world around him. Whether she does this because she knows it is the life he would want to lead--and should be leading--if he were not ill, or because she's going for the trappings even if the reality is skewed...readers will have to decide for themselves. I believe the former. I think that had it been possible, Paula would have wiped the flour and spices off her hands, reached deep into John's psyche and dragged him into the light if she could. This is a woman who doesn't give up on her man. I have a friend whose husband recently went through a similar breakdown and is now recovering. Her story (sans pasta) is so similar to Paula's, reading the book was like hearing an echo. That their husbands recovered is truly a testament to the power of love. But Paula would be the better cook by miles.

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.

In her so descriptive you can taste it memoir, Keeping The Feast, author Paula Buttrini describes most of her life and familial traditions, but she centers around a series of tragedies that leave her husband in a persistent depression. Facing a nightmare for any wife, Buttrini lushly describes how something a small as preparing a meal helped her family to heal and survive. Feast slowly doles out the traumatizing incidents that threatened to break her family while the author smartly anchors her story with vivid childhood and adult memories focusing around food. This well organized construction balances out her tear inducing passages of grief and loss. The result is two parts inspiration and one part unchecked food lost that is bound to make your mouth water while providing sustenance for your heart and soul.

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.

(Well, except in the first Comment.)

Paula Butturini and John Tagliabue met and and lived in Rome in the 1980s. Like many of us, their early romance was enhanced by shared cooking and meals. Tagliabue was assigned to Warsaw, and just before their wedding, Butturini was badly beaten during the Velvet Revolution in Prauge. Her husband was shot during the uprising against Ceausescu, nearly died, and fell into a deep depression.

They returned eventually to Rome, "ghostlike", to play "the one wild card we possessed; our love for Rome and the rituals we clung to there, all involving nourishment of one sort or another." Tagliabue's depression seems to have moderated from time to time through the endless rounds of cooking and eating -- the text reminds me of the joyous eating celebrated by A. J. Leibling in Europe and memorialized in books like A.J. Liebling: The Sweet Science and Other Writings: The Earl of Louisiana / The Jollity Building / Between Meals / The Press (Library of America No. 191).

In the end, though, Butturini finds that she is healed by food: "All of us cook, I think, in part, to feed our daily hunger, but just as important, and perhaps more so, we cook and eat to feed our spirits, to keep us all in the same orbit of life."

As a caregiver myself, many passages of this book resonated with me; making my corned beef dinner yesterday was a pleasant interlude, and eating it with my wife and son an even happier one.

I would have like to see some of Butturini's recipes in this book, and I've taken the liberty to add two from her blog in the first Comment. I enjoyed her style of writing these recipes; they add a welcome element of happiness to my memory of her rather grim book.

If you are struggling with depression, or a loved one is, you may find this brave memoir of great value. I did.

Robert C. Ross 2010

Addendum: Writing this review made me reflect on how important food is in the courting process; somehow feeding a loved one seems to enhance the romance. When I started dating my wife, I took her to a number of fancy restaurants -- but realized to my horror on the third or fourth date that I had only enough money for half the bill.

She bailed me out -- not for the first time -- and suggested that we should start to eat dinners at my apartment -- it would save me lots of money and the food would be just as good. Turned out to be absolutely true, and the ambience wasn't bad either. Forty years on, we are still cooking and eating together -- I wonder how important food was in that equation. :) B.

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.

"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.