Lisa Donovan Our Lady Of Perpetual Hunger
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Named a Favorite Book for Southerners in 2020 by Garden & Gun Donovan is such a vivid writer--smart, raunchy, vulnerable and funny-- that if her vaunted caramel cakes and sugar pies are half as good as her prose, well, I'd be open to even giving that signature buttermilk whipped cream she tops her desserts with a try.'--Maureen Corrigan, NPRNoted chef and James Beard Award-winning essayist Lisa Donovan helped establish some of the South's most important kitchens, and her pastry work is at the forefront of a resurgence in traditional desserts. Yet Donovan struggled to make a living in an industry where male chefs built successful careers on the stories, recipes, and culinary heritage passed down from generations of female cooks and cooks of color. At one of her career peaks, she made the perfect dessert at a celebration for food-world goddess Diana Kennedy. When Kennedy asked why she had not heard of her, Donovan said she did not know. I do, Kennedy said, Stop letting men tell your story. OUR LADY OF PERPETUAL HUNGER is Donovan's searing, beautiful, and searching chronicle of reclaiming her own story and the narrative of the women who came before her. Her family's matriarchs found strength and passion through food, and they inspired Donovan's accomplished career. Donovan's love language is hospitality, and she wants to welcome everyone to the table of good food and fairness. Donovan herself had been told at every juncture that she wasn't enough: she came from a struggling southern family that felt ashamed of its own mixed race heritage and whose elders diminished their women. She survived abuse and assault as a young mother. But Donovan's salvations were food, self-reliance, and the network of women in food who stood by her. In the school of the late John Egerton, OUR LADY OF PERPETUAL HUNGER is an unforgettable Southern journey of class, gender, and race as told at table.Southern pastry chef Lisa Donovan chronicles her messy, decades-long process of coming to own her worth in a smart and vulnerable new memoir. 'Our Lady Of Perpetual Hunger' Is A Savory Memoir Of. Renowned southern pastry chef Lisa Donovan's memoir of cooking, survival, and the incredible power in reclaiming the stories of women. Noted chef and James Beard Award-winning essayist Lisa Donovan helped establish some of the South's most important kitchens, and her. 'Lisa Donovan writes with a voice that is both bruised and tender in Our Lady of Perpetual Hunger. In tracing her path to food, Donovan honors the women who shaped her philosophy in the kitchen, reminding us of the necessity of women telling their stories in a. OUR LADY OF PERPETUAL HUNGER is Donovan's searing, beautiful, and searching chronicle of reclaiming her own story and the narrative of the women who came before her. Her family's matriarchs found strength and passion through food, and they inspired Donovan's accomplished career.
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Lisa Donovan Our Lady Of Perpetual Hunger High School
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Reviews
'Our Lady of Perpetual Hunger is more than the story of a woman who finds her own voice in the patriarchal world of professional cooking. It's also the story of making a life -- a life of love, of community, of commitment to the flame of creativity that somehow manages to burn against all odds. Lisa Donovan has written nothing less than the story of making a life in our times.' --Margaret Renkl, author of Late Migrations
'Lisa Donovan is one of the country's great pastry chefs, but this isn't a story about food, really. It's about the strength of womanhood and motherhood. It's about staring down the betrayals that women face. And it's about the redemptive power, not of food itself, but of finding common cause in feeding others.'--Francis Lam, host, The Splendid Table
'A critique of the 'world that men made, ' a pledge to the women who came before her, and a challenge to work in new ways, Our Lady of Perpetual Hunger blazes a path of self-discovery that manages, as great memoir must, to serve readers more than self. Lisa Donovan knows things we need to know.' --John T. Edge, author of The Potlikker Papers 'In Our Lady of Perpetual Hunger, Lisa Donovan writes a line I kept returning to: 'I had vigor, the kind you could taste.' I could taste the writing in this book. Her breathless descriptors conjure heat and possibility, her incisive memories capture the dank and earthen bits. To give a book life, a wise writer understands her myths must die. This book's heart is its truth, one woman's unyielding look in the mirror and well beyond it. Lisa's ultimate embrace of the human who stares back at her is a kind of freedom for us all.' --Osayi Endolyn, James Beard Award-winning writer 'Yes, it's about love, family, food, and one woman's personal and professional journey. But more than all that, Our Lady of Perpetual Hunger is about life force, the unquenchable flame within us that demands to survive and thrive. It could only be written by Lisa Donovan, and it should be read by everyone.' --Mary Laura Philpott, author of I Miss You When I Blink
'Lisa Donovan writes with a voice that is both bruised and tender in Our Lady of Perpetual Hunger. In tracing her path to food, Donovan honors the women who shaped her philosophy in the kitchen, reminding us of the necessity of women telling their stories in a world so eagerly determined to erase them. We are quite lucky to live in a world where Donovan has written her own story with such grace.' --Mayukh Sen, James Beard Award-winning writer
Conversation Starters from ReadingGroupChoices.com
Read MoreHere's a beaut of a sentence, one of many, from Lisa Donovan's new memoir, Our Lady of Perpetual Hunger: '[I]f someone values you only when you're about to walk out the door, you should definitely keep walking.'
Donovan is a celebrated southern pastry chef. Because I'm not a foodie, I didn't know that before I picked up her memoir, which is in the M.F.K. Fisher/Ruth Reichl tradition of a woman making sense of her life through her passion for food — or in Donovan's case — specifically for baking. Along the way, Donovan, who was born into a mixed-race, working-class, military family, somehow summoned up the strength to walk out of a lot of doors.
When she was barely out of high school, Donovan became pregnant by an abusive boyfriend. For the sake of her infant son, she caved to family pressure to give the relationship another try. Donovan moved in with her baby's father for a few months, was beaten and raped by him, and just managed to escape with her son to her parents' house.
A few years later, Donovan landed a job teaching art at a conservative private girls school in Nashville. As an unwed single mother, Donovan was lectured by the school's headmaster about what 'a bad influence' she'd be on the girls. She also found out during the school year that she was vastly underpaid compared to comparable male teachers.
Our Lady Of Perpetual School
Before she walked out that door, Donovan took her art class, full of girls blinkered by family wealth, on a field trip to the faculty parking lot, where she showed her students the used and dented cars of their teachers as exhibit A of how the other 95 percent of people in the world lives.
And, most publicly, Donovan walked out the door of Husk, a restaurant founded by celebrity southern chef Sean Brock, because she found the atmosphere of that kitchen so toxic and sexist. Even though Donovan was receiving acclaim for her work as de-facto executive pastry chef, when she asked for the official title — and the raise that went with it — she was told she'd have to essentially fire one of the female pastry cooks working under her to get the money.
Here's another beaut of a sentence from Donovan — in fact, a couple of them — that hone in on the danger to women (particularly in the food industry) of contenting themselves with gratitude and praise from men for their work, in lieu of professional recognition:
Women are revered straight into abjection, useful only as a totem of inspiration. When we go to make ... work our own, we are unable to survive in the industry the men built, the one they sell our wares within.
I'm making Donovan sound like a natural-born badass, always self-possessed enough to know when it's time to fight or take flight. But that's not how she comes off in this memoir, which chronicles her hard-won, decades-long, two-steps-forward-and-one-step-back messy process of coming to own her worth. Donovan also began to see the legions of women who never got credit for their culinary inventions and skill — among them, her own Mexican and Appalachian ancestors, as well as the enslaved people and domestic workers whose traditions form the foundation of Southern cooking.
Lisa Donovan Our Lady Of Perpetual Hunger
Donovan is such a vivid writer — smart, raunchy, vulnerable and funny — that if her vaunted caramel cakes and sugar pies are half as good as her prose, well, I'd be open to even giving that signature buttermilk whipped cream she tops her desserts with a try. There's a fabulous scene early on where Donovan recalls fighting to walk through a door this time. It's the door of a college classroom where a sculpture class is about to begin. The young professor (who, by the way, will become Donovan's husband) doesn't want to let her in because the students will be doing welding and Donovan is toting along her nursing infant son.
As the professor becomes more of an obstacle, Donovan gets angrier, fantasizing about educating this guy about what it's like to have certain female body parts welded together again after 'squeezing [out] a nine-pound baby.' Unfortunately, that's as specific as I can be about the robust and salty language that infuses this entire memoir.
Our Lady of Perpetual Hunger is about the multiple hungers that Donovan has been driven to satisfy in her life — for wonderful food, certainly, but also for love and community and for gratifying work that can support a family. It's not too much to hope for, is it? But as, Donovan chronicles, it can take women a while to muster up the sense of self to know they can do more than just hope.