Author Appearance: Paula Butturini

In her exquisite and affecting memoir, Paula Butturini tells a tale of extraordinary strength born of extraordinary tragedy.  Keeping the Feast: One Couple’s Story of Love, Food, and Healing in Italy is the true story of the staggering events that plunged the author’s brand-new marriage into crisis, and the unexpected fortitude they derived from the simple daily rituals of food and fellowship.  Journalists and food lovers Paula Butturini and John Tagliabue met in Italy, fell in love, and four years later, married in Rome.  But soon after the wedding, while reporting for the New York Times on the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe, John was struck and nearly killed by sniper fire. He would recover from his injuries in less than a year, but the psychological consequences of the incident would linger long after his physical wounds had healed.  As John began his plummet into a deep, enduring depression, it brought an abrupt end to the life Paula and John had known together, and the beginning of a new phase of life neither had planned for.

The couple returned to Rome in hope that the natural splendor and simple bounty of the place where they shared so many happy times would help to hasten the recovery process. There, calling upon her memories of her mother’s battle with depression, Paula began to reconsider all of her previous assumptions about healing. She discovered that sometimes patience is a vice, and anger a virtue—that at times it is vital to make demands of the sick, that they show signs of recovery. And she rediscovered the curative powers of the most fundamental of human rituals: the daily sharing of food around the family table.  Gorgeously crafted and deeply poignant, Keeping the Feast is at once a singular story of one couple’s fight to overcome their incredible circumstances, and a universal tale of hardship and healing.