CNS STORY: Roman church, food play roles in author's road back from tragedies

BUTTURINI Feb-26-2010 (810 words) With photo and book cover. xxxn

Roman church, food play roles in author's road back from tragedies

By Nancy Frazier O'Brien
Catholic News Service

WASHINGTON (CNS) -- It was only in the quiet of Rome's Church of Santa Brigida -- a silence punctuated by the chanting of the cloistered Italian nuns living there -- that Paula Butturini was able to get angry at the tragedy that had become her life.

Angry at the sniper shooting in Romania that left her reporter husband critically ill and plunged him into a deep depression that lasted for years. Angry at her own beating by police during a protest she was covering in Czechoslovakia. Angry at the depression that led her mother to walk into a creek and drown.

"On the very worst days ... I would sometimes find to my horror that I was not only crying but pounding my fist on the back of the pew in front of me," Butturini writes in her new book, "Keeping the Feast," just published by Riverhead Books.

Subtitled "One Couple's Story of Love, Food and Healing in Italy," the book mixes Butturini's memories -- most related to food -- of growing up in an Italian-American family in Connecticut with the bleak experiences after her husband of 23 days, New York Times reporter John Tagliabue, was shot and nearly killed in Romania.

The back-and-forth between her childhood and adult experiences was essential to keeping her sanity as she wrote the book, Butturini said in an interview with Catholic News Service Feb. 23.

When she started writing "Keeping the Feast" in 1996, it was seven years after Tagliabue's Dec. 23, 1989, shooting, and the beating five weeks earlier that had left Butturini, then the Eastern European correspondent for the Chicago Tribune, briefly unconscious in Prague, Czechoslovakia. Her mother's suicide, her father's cancer diagnosis and the return of her brother's kidney disease also had come in quick succession as Tagliabue headed deeper into depression.

"Too many awful things happened in a row," Butturini said. "I was so totally spent from writing about them for days and days" that she decided instead to write about ... asparagus.

"It brought me back to peace and calm," she said. Writing about growing up and the food that accompanied it also took her back to a time "when my mother wasn't sick, when everything was whole," she added.

Although they had been living in Warsaw, Poland, when Tagliabue was shot, the couple returned to Rome, where they had met and married, for his recovery. Although her husband did not speak at all some days, Butturini tried to keep normalcy in their lives by buying and cooking three meals a day, and sitting down with him to eat them.

"Who would have thought that the most fundamental of human rituals -- buying, preparing, eating and sharing our daily bread -- would have become our tether to normal life as we struggled to make the crossing from our old life before (the shooting) to our new life after?" she wrote.

After shopping each day in Rome's Campo di Fiori market, Butturini passed by Santa Brigida, stopping in each day to kneel before a painting of Mary and the child Jesus or to listen to the nuns' chanting. She thinks the anger that emerged during those visits helped her to move from patient acceptance of her husband's situation to the feeling that she could demand more from him and eventually to his greater efforts to emerge from depression.

Although Butturini originally began the book so that Tagliabue's children -- John, now 35, and Anna, 28 -- would understand what their father had been through, she set it aside for years when their daughter, Julia, was born in 1997. The Tagliabues now live in Paris, where Julia is a seventh-grader at a Catholic school.

"Depression often runs in families, and although no one seems to know how much of it is genetic and how much of it is not, I wanted to give Peter and Anna -- and later Julia too, once she was born -- all the information they might ever want on the confusion and chaos that reigned so long after their father was shot," she said.

Although she did not set out to become an advocate for those with depression and their family members, Butturini said she has found many interested in that aspect of the book during her current U.S. book tour.

"I wasn't expecting people to be so upfront" about their own experiences, she said. But she said many seem to have been touched by "the feeling of hope that comes through" in the book.

Although depression is "an awful illness," she said, it is important for everyone affected to remember that "you won't feel that way for the rest of your life."

The best comparison she has heard is that depression is like a fever, Butturini said.

"It's when the fever is raging that you are in danger," she said. "But it passes. You just have to hang on until it passes."

END

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