Photo by Owen Franken about the author
Paula Butturini
Journalist and Author of Keeping the Feast: One Couple's Story of Love, Food, and Healing in Italy
Paula Butturini was the Chicago Tribune‘s East European correspondent during the Fall of Communism, and spent years flying around the world with Pope John Paul II while covering the Vatican for United Press International. A longtime contributor to The New York Times Travel section, she is the author of Keeping the Feast, a memoir that follows a single bullet fired by a Romanian sniper at her reporter husband in 1989.
Butturini uses the memories of simple, nourishing, childhood food to parse her family’s dive into depression, and trace—with hope—its zigzagging path back to the surface. But Keeping the Feast always looks frankly at the havoc that post-traumatic stress can provoke in a family, and how one family fought to get beyond it. The New York Times Book Review described the book as “blunt and brave”; People wrote that Feast was “a reminder that food sustains not only bodies but souls as well.”
Born and raised on the Connecticut shore, Butturini lives in Paris with her husband, John Tagliabue, and their daughter.
Learn more about this speakerPress Links
"Salving Psychological Wounds with Talk and Food"
The Baltimore Sun
"The Pasta Cure"
The New York Times Book Review
"The Healing Power of Food"
The Boston Globe
"Salvation in a Bowl of Spaghetti"
American Way
Paula Butturini's Article Archive
The New York Times
Featured Book
Keeping the Feast
"If food is love and love heals, does that mean that food heals? Paula Butturini proves the equation in gorgeous yet unadorned prose. I will never, ever forget this book."
—Patricia Volk, author of Stuffed and To My Dearest Friends
Speaking Topics
- Keeping the Feast
- Keeping the Feast and Spilling Family Secrets
- Keeping the Feast, Post-traumatic Stress, and Clinical Depression
- Keeping the Feast and Keeping the Faith
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Keeping the Feast and Darkness Visible
View Topic Descriptions »
Speaking Topics — Paula Butturini
Keeping the Feast
How simple, nourishing food eaten around a family table and memories of happy childhood meals can help traumatized families heal.
Keeping the Feast and Spilling Family Secrets
Frank talk with adults—and children—about mental illness in a family; freeing the next generation from fear.
Keeping the Feast, Post-traumatic Stress, and Clinical Depression
Helping families cope as suicide rates spike among U.S. servicemen who have spent time in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Keeping the Feast and Keeping the Faith
Looking at grace from the maelstrom of family trauma.
Keeping the Feast and Darkness Visible
Using literature to fight the stigma of mental illness.
Please contact us for booking requirements and availability.