More than 15 years ago, when Jacob was struggling with drugs and I was frantic to help him, author and educator Libby Cataldi and her son Jeff spoke at our local hospital.

Their “talk” followed Libby’s memoir, “Stay Close”, in which she recounts years trying to help Jeff while facing her own crises.  The mother-son duo helped me then and still do.

Today Jeff is more than 19 years sober.

And now family – and love – are again the theme of Libby’s latest memoir, “It Takes a Lifetime to Learn How to Live.”

The story begins with Nonna, the Italian grandmother who helped to raise Libby amid turbulent years with an abusive mother.  Painful to read at times, the chapters recount the author’s challenges raising two sons, enduring a divorce and surviving breast cancer.  When the world is too much with her, she escapes to Italy to find the remote village of Nonna’s birth.

It’s a quest to seek relatives, but it’s far more than that – a fierce yearning to understand her heritage, to grasp what formed her family, and ultimately what formed her.  In the tiny village of Rotondella in southern Italy Libby knows no one and no Italian, let alone the region’s strange dialect. Portions of her story in which she finally discovers an elderly cousin will keep readers spellbound.

Nonna’s cooking is central to the theme.  Her recipes fairly simmer off the pages.  She is described as a “painter with foods” as she methodically “stirs rich red sugo” for Sunday dinners, or at other times when she seeks to soothe her troubled granddaughter.  It is love expressed through food.

Libby’s courage in the face of harrowing episodes, and her determination to understand her roots, call up heroines on similar treks.  But this one is infused with the character of Nonna, the strong, independent, tremendously resilient matriarch whose love and verbal caresses sustain Libby through adulthood.

For anyone who has been fortunate to know a grandmother’s love – and especially a grandmother from another country – this book is a must read.  It invites you to spend a few delicious hours breathing in the scent of Nonna’s cooking while calling up your own grandparent.  For me it was my Russian-born grandmother, and the kasha, kugel and blintzes she served her family with infinite care.

Subtitled “An Italian American story of coming home,” this memoir took Libby a lifetime to write.

What she gives us is a coming home of our own.