Keeping the Feast: One Couple’s Story of Love, Food, and Healing, Paula Butturini, 1594488975

Keeping the Feast: One Couple’s Story of Love, Food, and Healing in Italy by Paula Butturini

Print Length: 272 Pages
Publisher: Riverhead Hardcover
Publication Date: February 18, 2010
Language: English
ASIN: B0030CVPNG
ISBN-10: 1594488975
ISBN-13: 978-1594488979
File Format: EPUB

Keeping the Feast: One Couple’s Story of Love, Food, and Healing, Paula Butturini, EPUB, 1594488975 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.

A Treasure

First of all, the quality of the writing is superb. The author’s beautiful writing makes this true story even more poignant because she evokes the emotions and feel of situations so compellingly. It is the story of a couple’s healing after he is shot in Romania. Added to the suspenseful tale of his recovery is the background of places such as Prague but, most especially, Rome and the delight and healing nature of life in that city, of the sensuality of Italian food, of the curative nature of what Italy offered them. The rituals of preparing and sharing meals are a thread as the author relates both her own background and her husband’s. When I heard the author speak, however, she chose to empasize the depression that hit her family and her husband as a way of bringing the issue of depression more out into the open. Certainly her book will be helpful to anyone who has dealt with that, perhaps especially to anyone who has a family member suffering from PTSD.