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

By: Myra Clarke

Myra Clarke — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 04:56:58 +0000

A well-written reflection of how the rituals and routines of work, food, and family and the healing powers of place, patience, and love helped Butturini and her husband prevail in the face of physical suffering, mental anguish, and loss. Though too grim to be an enjoyable read, the book is an honest account of navigating the twists and turns of a life and marriage for better or worse, through sickness and health. Rating: 3 / 5

By: Avid Reader

Avid Reader — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 03:39:35 +0000

As someone who had a relationship with a seriously depressed person who would stay in bed and wail/cry/sob while taking several antidepressants and sedatives I picked up the book with some interest. I must say to completely get into the book you must love food and cooking, especially Italian cooking. At one point in the book the couple are about to move to Warsaw from Rome and the author goes to a stand in the Campo dei Fiori and lists everything the stand has to offer. The list goes on for about three pages! Others might delight in this. Poland’s markets at the time had little to compare. Butturini intersperses her and her husband’s terrible time dealing with his depression with stories from her family, including her mother’s depression, but mostly meals her family have enjoyed. Food and the preparation of it seemed to have acted as an anchor, preparing three wonderful meals a day – though stopping at a local church to pray and bang angrily on the pew in front – grounded her. Electroconvulsive therapy was used on her husband 30 years before but was unavailable at the time in Italy – it being seen as barbaric I guess. He finally gets this therapy again in later years when his depression returns. He does lose short term memory but is able to work again. I think if the book just focused on the depression and its effects the story would have been to hard to bear but for me it was too much about food, food that I don’t eat, not being Italian and not being a meat/fish eater. So much of the book failed for me, but I know several people who would just love to read this book if it were about the food alone. (though there was one dish of cut-up fruit that her father made for her with a sauce of oil, lemon juice, salt and pepper that sounded intriguing) The use of electroshock or electroconvulsive therapy had been brought out into the light by people like Kitty Dukakis and Carrie Fisher but others unaware of this might like more details about this therapy and its effects than this book presents. The book also kind of ends on a low note, remarking that when people get older and closer to dying they lose interest in preparing big wonderful meals. For the author, she still rises to the occasion because she has a family to feed. Rating: 3 / 5

By: The Golden Reviewer

The Golden Reviewer — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 01:35:25 +0000

Paula Butturini and John Tagliabue, both foreign correspondents, met in Italy, fell in love, and married several years later. Shortly after their wedding they were given assignments in Communist Warsaw Poland. The time is at the beginning of the Polish revolution. John is critically wounded by a sniper’s bullet and their happy carefree life they had known in Rome no longer existed plunging them into a horrible nightmare of events,Paula, in her own words, tells of her struggles to overcome John’s many surgeries, his bouts of clinical depression, his treatments by numerous psychiatrists,and the birth of their daughter. She is not only trying to survive John’s illness, but also the death of her mother by her own hands. Love, food and Italy is the sustaining factor throughout the entire book. One must read the book to see how the simple daily selection of food, preparing the meals, her memories of family dinners and the ritual of eating three meals together each day at the kitchen table played such an important role in the healing of two people and stabilized their very existence. The love of Italy’s countryside, good friends and good food healed a hurting family. An enjoyable read, but lacked substance. One learns a lot about ‘old world’ Italian cooking and the role food plays in the lives of Italian families. The story clearly points how the simple ritual of selecting, preparing and eating food can become an important step in the healing process. This book was provided as a review copy by the publisher. Rating: 3 / 5

By: An Educated Consumer

An Educated Consumer — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 00:26:24 +0000

One can applaud Paula Butturini as she has coped with a chronically depressed spouse, continuing to stay married, accept and love her husband John. “Keeping the Feast” ties their relationship with food and their survival. There was nothing extraordinary in her retelling of food memories. We all have them. Could not accept that it helped heal. Do believe cooking was a vehicle to maintain some stability. Paula’s mother committed suicide, a victim of depression; and her husband John had suffered a major bout before their marriage. Both Paula and John were European journalists. She had been beaten severely on one assignment, and he critcally injured while shot as a passenger in a car in the midst of another of his assignments. This shooting led to a long recuperation and the onset of a spiral of depressive and life altering periods. While the book is to tell a couple’s story, I only hear it thru Paula. While John has returned to work when well, his ‘voice’ in the story does not seem to be heard. There are so many aspects of living with depression that were not touched. The day to day life, their daughter’s questions were not explored in a realistic sense. The decision to have a child in the midst of this depressive state, the lack of staying on the job as journalists and impact financially stood out. The book strikes me more as a way for Paula to write a diary as part of a healing therapy. I wish them well. I wish them peace. Rating: 3 / 5

By: Addison Dewitt

Addison Dewitt — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 23:46:19 +0000

While recovering from wounds – both physical and mental – the author and her husband stay in Italy and cook/eat a lot of meals. A. Lot. Of. Meals. They eat them at their friends’ villas, they eat them in their apartments in Rome. The author eats them on the way back from the market and she remembers eating many of them at home and at her grandparent’s. “Eating to heal” is the metaphor and it’s hammered home again and again. Eat and you shall be free. Eat and you shall remember. Eat, eat, eat. And also, cook. Cook from recipes, cook from scratch. Cook here and cook there. Cook to heal and cook to remember. Cook to keep your sanity. Cook, cook, cook. However personal and possibly triumphant Butturini’s eating/cooking heal-fest was for her and her husband, “Feast” is ultimately an extremely depressing book with a tiny ray of light here and there for the rest of us. I found it very difficult to get through and came to the conclusion that the overall concept/premise leaves one wanting. I was hoping that there would be a listing of old family recipes in the back, but. . . no. (sigh)The warm writing style is ala that fabulous radio program “The Splendid Table” when she’s writing about food, yet as dreary as the retelling of the Dresden bombing when she’s writing about anything else. And it’s mind-numbingly and uncomfortably repetitive. I lost count of the number of times she used the phrase “during John’s illness” and wrote basically the same vignette over and over again. It was like listening to someone whine about their fibromyalgia every time you visit. I am trying to resist the broken record cliché but that’s exactly what comes to mind reading “Feast”. Call me cold-hearted but I just could not get to the threshold of caring about these people and that’s the main problem: it’s not relatable for many. “Feast” will please those who have gone through trauma and are trying to recover from the resulting depression, but others might be better off dining elsewhere. Rating: 2 / 5