‘I had been completely ripped apart’: Julia Busuttil Nishimura’s shock postnatal diagnosis

Julia Busuttil Nishimura is a hugger. As soon as I enter the bustling cafe where we’re meeting, she’s up from the table and trapping me in a warm embrace, her mass of dark curls brushing against my cheek.

Here are some other things the 38-year-old Italian teacher and food blogger turned cookbook author is fond of: tennis (both playing and watching), lamps, and headscarves. And peaches. She really loves peaches.

“I do like a peach; I think I mention one in all of my books,” she says over lunch at Florian in Melbourne’s Carlton North, not far from the home she shares with her Japanese-born husband of 12 years, Nori, and their three boys, aged 11, six and nine months.

In fact, it was here they recently road-tested eating out as a family of five. “It was kind of chaotic, but it was cute,” she says, laughing.

Enjoying food, both making and eating it, is something she’s keen to instil in her children while they are young. Her strongest food memory is from when she was 22 and working in Italy as an au pair. “The family would make this cherry tomato pasta with garlic and basil with paccheri [a short, tubular pasta], and good olive oil – simple things,” she says.

For Busuttil Nishimura, whose career and personal life have been on a warp-speed trajectory for the past decade, simplicity is more than a buzzword – it’s her whole raison d’être. “Cooking for your friends and family doesn’t need to be fancy or stressful,” she says. Nor does simple have to mean – dare she say it – basic. “The kind of cooking that I do is so understated that you have to have the confidence that you can use just four ingredients, and it’s going to be delicious.”

But if not for a chance meeting at a local farmer’s market with her now-publisher, Mary Small, who had been a fan of Busuttil Nishimura’s mid-2000s food blog, Ostro, she may have remained content in her former career as an Italian teacher.

“It is quite uncommon now to have been discovered, and not go through MasterChef,” she says. After her 2017 debut cookbook, Ostro, came out to rave reviews for its celebration of unhurried, simple cooking (Jamie Oliver and Nigella Lawson were fans), she still didn’t know if she could make food her full-time job.

“I was a nobody, really, I had my blog, it was the very early days of Instagram,” she says. “I never really set a timeline or had a plan, which for a Virgo, and someone with anxiety, [is rare].”

This month Busuttil Nishimura will release her fifth cookbook (she also wrote an award-winning children’s book, Sundays Under the Lemon Tree), Simple Pleasures. She hopes fans will see it as a balm for these “crazy” times. “We’re so inundated with the news and the busyness of life – it is so overwhelming,” she says. The recipes in the book, which range from hearty soups to chocolate mousse, are about “coming back to what actually is meaningful and brings us pleasure”.

For Busuttil Nishimura, that means leaning into her softness, both physically and emotionally: “This idea of slowing down, but not in an arduous way,” she says. “The small moments that punctuate our day are what makes cooking – and life – so pleasurable.”

Aside from the sleep deprivation of having a young baby, life is in a good place for Busuttil Nishimura. But, as we tuck into our plates of cured salmon, soft egg, and pickled fennel and cucumber, she tells me the past decade has been punctuated by periods of postpartum anxiety following the births of Haruki, now 11, and Yukito, 6.

“When you have a baby, you’re very raw and emotional – it makes you reflect a lot on how you grew up. My anxiety’s all around health stuff, because my mum was really unwell when I was little.”

Born in Adelaide as the youngest of three children, Busuttil Nishimura was two when her mother developed breast cancer at age 40 (her parents separated when she was six). Even as a child, food offered her a place of “peace and calm and escape”.

“There’s something about the beauty of food, nature and the reliability of mostly knowing how it’s going to turn out – there’s something special about that,” she says.

Becoming a mother at 26, before any of her friends and with Nori working long hours as a chef, was an incredibly lonely time. “It’s really isolating,” she recalls.

We’re trying to build something for the both of us, and for our kids. It’s a big juggle.

JULIA BUSUTTIL NISHIMURA

Since then, she has worked with a therapist, and says her third pregnancy was her best yet. “It took me three goes to really figure out what I needed to ask for … to have a great pregnancy and a great postpartum time.” She remembers thinking at the time: “I’m the most settled in my career that I’ve been, and everything feels like the jigsaw puzzle has fit together.”

But a shock came about a week after Mikoto was born, when Busuttil Nishimura developed jaw and neck pain. Initially, she dismissed it as a delayed reaction to labour, but then she started dribbling while trying to drink water. Then one eye wouldn’t close. “I just remember thinking the worst case was a clot in my brain,” she says.

After tests ruled out a stroke, Busuttil Nishimura was diagnosed with the autoimmune response Bell’s palsy, which affects up to one in 2500 people each year, and is more prevalent in women in late-stage pregnancy and after giving birth.

“It does all flash before you,” she says of the health scare. After spending a week in hospital for treatment, Busuttil Nishimura remembers “standing at home, wearing disposable underwear, leaking through my bra, I’ve got an eye patch on, and I’m holding my baby, and thinking, ‘What is this?’ I just felt like I had been completely ripped apart and put back together.”

It took about three months for her to make a full recovery, and despite not being able to smile at Mikoto in his first weeks, weirdly, she says, the experience “sparked something inside me to stay positive”. Even so, she worried about the impact the illness would have on the book, which was already in production, and future work.

“You already feel so self-conscious postpartum,” she says. “Ideally, I wouldn’t be 13 weeks postpartum on a cookbook shoot.”

She concedes that not having an official period of maternity leave is the price of running her own business. “But conversely, I feel so lucky that I can do what I do, and it’s so flexible.”

Part of why it works is that Busuttil Nishimura and Nori, 39, who now works as a tennis coach, have taken turns being the primary earner (she dislikes the term “breadwinner”) and caregiver. But her cookbooks, media commitments and the children have limited her husband’s opportunities to travel overseas where there are better coaching opportunities.

She says their success as a team lies in seeing her work as a family business, rather than as a solo pursuit. “We’re trying to build something for the both of us, and for our kids. It’s a big juggle … We both can’t be at the top of our game while the kids are so little. And it just works.

“We’re just the most perfect fit – I can feel it in my bones, just how matched we are and how supportive of each other we are,” she says of her husband, whom she met in Melbourne while working in the same Collingwood restaurant. “We go through these seasons, and mostly I have benefited from it. He’s really sacrificed a lot for me to have the career I do have.”

The success of her first four cookbooks has opened doors for Busuttil Nishimura to also work with fashion and beauty brands, including Lee Mathews and Mecca, and to dabble in television presenting. “I actually can’t watch [myself on TV] … I am unpolished, but it’s just real,” she says, laughing. “If you try and be something that you’re not you can come across as being a bit contrived.”

While she’s keen to do more TV, writing remains her core passion. “I’d like to write books forever,” she says. “I just want longevity, really. I don’t want to do things too fast. I’m really big on thinking things through.”

Between answering DMs about readers’ recipe dilemmas, walking the occasional red carpet, writing regular magazine columns, and developing recipes in her kitchen while her eldest two are at school, Busuttil Nishimura always comes back to the one word that brings her the most happiness: simplicity.

One of her most treasured family moments happened during a recent blackout, when they played Uno by candlelight and ate all the ice cream in the freezer before it melted. “My work is so consuming, and I’m always doing a million things at a time,” she says, “so when I can put that away to just be with the kids at home – to me, that’s the best.”