Books, Books, Books

It seems as though I've been thinking a lot about books lately, but not enough about my own.

Last week I attended two of my friend Paula Butturini's readings for her beautiful and touching memoir, “Keeping the Feast: One Couple’s Story of Love, Food and Healing in Italy”, while she was making a rare visit to my part of the world before returning to Paris.

I don't think it will be long before most of America learns about this book that extols the importance of food, friends and families in surviving major life crises. Due to the extraordinary story, brilliant writing and frank discussion of depression, Keeping the Feast already is garnering major league publicity, including a piece in the March 8 issue of People magazine (the edition with Susan Boyle on the cover) and in a USA Today article last week that you can read by clicking here.

Another book that's received nationwide attention is "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks," a fascinating true story about the source of the scientifically famous HeLa cells written by Rebecca Skloot, who also visited my local independent RiverRun Bookstore not long ago.

HeLa cells were the first human cells grown in a laboratory and were critical to developing the polio vaccine and a number of important medicines. They also helped advance our knowledge about cancer and viruses, and were instrumental in scientific breakthoughs like cloning and gene mapping.

The source of all these cells was tissue removed in 1951 from a poor Baltimore woman named Henrietta Lacks, without her knowledge, before she died of cancer. According to the book jacket, if you piled all the HeLa cells ever grown on a scale, they would weigh over 50 million metric tons -- as much as 100 Empire State Buildings. HeLa cells have been bought and sold by the billions for medical research over the past few decades but her family never received one dime and even today, cannot afford health insurance.

Meanwhile, books have been arriving in my house over the past week from mystery writers who will be on the panel I was selected to moderate at the Malice Domestic conference at the end of April outside Washington, DC. Our subject is the "Whydunit?: Focusing on the Why to Get to the Who." It's a tough job having to prepare for this traditional mystery conference by reading great books by New York Times best-selling and award-winning author Louise Penny, Ellen Hart (24 books and counting!), Cynthia Riggs (her protagonist is 92) and Canadian writer Joan Boswell, but someone's got to do it!

And just yesterday, I spent part of the afternoon listening to Vermont author Howard Frank Mosher talk about his new book, "Walking to Gatlinburg," a Civil War-era novel that chronicles the nightmarish odyssey of 17-year-old Morgan Kinneson from northern Vermont to Tennessee during 1864.

Mosher is the author of 10 novels and a travel memoir. Yesterday he gave a slide presentation of the real-life sources of some of the characters and incidents in his latest book.

He also talked about his muse -- a broken-down drunk songwriter he met in a Tennessee bar. Mosher says he overheard the guy give a young singer the best advice he's ever heard when it comes to creativity: "Don't hold nothin' back."

I'll be thinking about that as I try to put aside all these wonderful books written by other people and prepare to plunge back into my novel-in-progress. It's time for me to stop readin' and start writin' my own book instead. I hope you won't mind if this also means fewer blog postings along the way.

Keeping the Feast, Keeping a Friend

When I opened my local newspaper Sunday morning, the face of a woman I’ve known for more three decades was smiling back at me.

Paula Butturini, whose beautifully written memoir “Keeping the Feast: One Couple’s Story of Love, Food and Healing in Italy” is earning fabulous reviews, was featured in a story in the Portsmouth Herald because she is coming to town March 3 for a reading at our beloved independent bookstore, RiverRun, as part of her East Coast book tour. (Click here to read the Herald story.) This photo was taken when No. 1 and No. 2 son attended Paula’s reading Sunday night in Washington, DC. Paula knit my oldest son’s first baby sweater, which I still have. Like I said, we go back awhile.

I knew Paula years before she was beaten by the Czech police, her husband New York Times reporter John Tagliabue was nearly killed by a sniper during the Romanian revolution – which later plunged her wonderful spouse into debilitating bouts of depression – and her mother committed suicide. In “Keeping the Feast,” she details how important food and other kinds of nourishment – such as friends and family – have been in helping her survive these tragedies and talks frankly about the disease of depression.

During most of Paula's major life challenges, she has lived on the other side of the Atlantic, calling a variety of countries home, while she and John worked as foreign correspondents. They reside in Paris now and although we've communicated by phone, letter, and now e-mail in between her visits back to the U.S., I did not fully fathom just how much Paula has endured until I read “Keeping the Feast.” Although I have known much of her story, and well remember the terror when John was shot a few months after their 1989 wedding, it is staggering to read the narrative in its entirety.

But Paula has always been a brave and determined woman.

She and I arrived at the Dallas office of United Press International, then the world’s second-largest news wire service, within a month of each other in 1977. At the time, we were the token Yankees – she from Connecticut and me from New Hampshire -- and among the token women hired to work in a 24-hour news bureau serving a nine-state region of the Southwest.

Both of us had worked at newspapers, but took very different paths to Dallas. She came from a Connecticut paper; I arrived via one in Lubbock, Texas. She was coming out of a marriage; I had no intention of going into one. I was thrilled to have my own apartment; she had the vision and courage to buy a home in a transition neighborhood and rehab it.

Most of us in the Dallas news bureau were single and/or young. We spent countless hours working and playing together. Because UPI operated around-the-clock, we shared many holidays, sometimes even eating Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners together in the middle of the UPI office. We staged holiday pageants, had poetry contests, and indulged in other creative behaviors to entertain ourselves between breaking news stories.

Central to this bonding was our softball team in the Dallas media league: Dr. Darkness and His Night Writers. Named after our pitcher, dubbed Dr. Darkness because of his years working the overnight shift and sometimes his mood, most of us weren't very athletic (journalists rarely are) but we never failed to make an impression on our opponents and the game stories written afterward were priceless. (Can you pick out Paula or me from this photo?)

The scorching softball season always ended with a memorable banquet, usually at Paula’s house. One year, we even donned formal wear. Constant to the ritual were the the awards, many of them quite unusual as I recall. The most coveted (which I never won) was: “The Shoes of the Doctor,” which consisted of that season's sneakers glued onto one of the leftover mirror tiles the Doctor considered trendy apartment décor. Even then, food and drink were important to the proceedings and nourished our friendship.

I still have the printed program we created for Paula’s going-away party when UPI transferred her to London. By then, I had changed my mind about marriage and Dr. Darkness (now referred to as Husband No. 1), and we hosted the party at our home. It was filled that night with not only most of our Dallas co-workers, but also many fellow Unipressers (which is what we called ourselves) who traveled great distances from throughout our nine-state region to wish Paula well as she began the foreign adventure that continues today. None of us could have imagined the trials she would later face.

But then, as now, we admired her grace, her courage and her honesty -- and knew her friendship was something to be treasured.