Keeping the Feast: One Couple's Story of Love, Food, and Healing in Italy
A story of food and love, injury and healing, Keeping the Feast is the triumphant memoir of one couple overcoming depression through nourishment and restoration in Italy\ Paula Butturini and John Tagliabue met in Italy, fell in love, and four years later, married in Rome. But less than a month after the wedding, tragedy struck. They had transferred from their Italian paradise to Warsaw and while reporting on an uprising in Romania, John was shot and nearly killed by sniper fire. Although...
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A story of food and love, injury and healing, Keeping the Feast is the triumphant memoir of one couple's nourishment and restoration in Italy after a period of tragedy, and the extraordinary sustaining powers of food, family, and friendship. Paula and John met in Italy, fell in love, and four years later, married in Rome. But less than a month after the wedding, tragedy struck. They had transferred from their Italian paradise to Warsaw and while reporting on an uprising in Romania, John was shot and nearly killed by sniper fire. Although he recovered from his physical wounds in less than a year, the process of healing had just begun. Unable to regain his equilibrium, he sank into a deep sadness that reverberated throughout their relationship. It was the abrupt end of what they'd known together, and the beginning of a new phase of life neither had planned for. All of a sudden, Paula was forced to reexamine her marriage, her husband, and herself. Paula began to reconsider all of her previous assumptions about healing. She discovered that sometimes patience can be a vice, anger a virtue. That sometimes it is vital to make demands of the sick, that they show signs of getting better. And she rediscovered the importance of the most fundamental of human rituals: the daily sharing of food around the family table. A universal story of hope and healing, Keeping the Feast is an account of one couple's triumph over tragedy and illness, and a celebration of the simple rituals of life, even during the worst life crises. Beautifully written and tremendously moving, Paula's story is a testament to the extraordinary sustaining powers of food and love, and to the stubborn belief that there is always an afterward, there is always hope. The New York Times - Mika Brzezinski …blunt and brave…Keeping the Feast shares with Julie Powell's Julie & Julia and Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love the insight that food can jump-start a journey toward solace. Can food cure clinical depression? Of course not. But the act of cooking and eating together—of keeping the feast—bolsters Butturini, and she in turn keeps Tagliabue alive. The real glue in this marriage scarred by tragedy is not Butturini's cooking but Butturini herself.
\ Mika Brzezinski…blunt and brave…Keeping the Feast shares with Julie Powell's Julie & Julia and Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love the insight that food can jump-start a journey toward solace. Can food cure clinical depression? Of course not. But the act of cooking and eating together—of keeping the feast—bolsters Butturini, and she in turn keeps Tagliabue alive. The real glue in this marriage scarred by tragedy is not Butturini's cooking but Butturini herself.\ —The New York Times\ \ \ \ \ Kirkus ReviewsA former overseas bureau journalist recalls the tragic circumstances that befell her husband and the European city that repaired their broken spirit. Butturini and her husband John Tagliabue returned to Rome in 1992 in a desperate attempt to rekindle the vibrant, happy life they'd embarked upon after falling in love there seven years prior. Both were foreign news reporters: The author was an East European correspondent for the Chicago Tribune, and Tagliabue was the Warsaw bureau chief for the New York Times. Butturini fondly revisits her travels to Rome in her early 30s, entranced by the stunning abundance of culture and embracing "the magic of honest food." She and Tagliabue had been dispatched to Prague in late 1989 to report on the anti-Communist revolution, but the assignment was a violent disaster and the start of the couple's "private tornado." Butturini was beaten repeatedly in the street by anti-terrorist police, and her husband took a sniper's bullet, shattering his pelvis. Long months of rehabilitation followed, as did a hepatitis B diagnosis and a bout of clinical depression, spurred on by the drowning death of Butturini's mother. Recalling their everlasting love of Italy, they returned to Rome for much-needed healing, reinvigoration and the "normalcy" that had so lushly enveloped them years prior. Though Tagliabue's extended illness tested her patience, a new life awaited them both. The author tempers both of their complicated, depressive family histories with memories of Sunday family dinners, homemade soups and pizzas, and childhood Christmases. "In our family the stomach was only slightly less important than the brain," she writes, "and according to my mother, clearly moretrustworthy and often more intelligent."A touching, if melancholy, feast for the senses, with a dash of inspiration for hearts in need of nourishment.\ \
