05/18/2020
Pastry chef and James Beard Award–winning essayist Donovan writes of her life in the restaurant industry in this feisty confessional. An army brat whose family moved often, Donovan eventually landed in a small coastal Florida town “that felt wholly and destructively permanent.” There, she worked as a server in a ramshackle Italian eatery, a “cigar den housed in a doublewide trailer.” It was “an oasis” for her, and her caring coworkers became her “first kitchen family.” Plans to leave for college and escape an abusive boyfriend ended with an unexpected pregnancy. She sought refuge by teaching herself to bake using library books and soon found “control through food” and “a deep sense of worth and value.” She moved to Nashville, juggled her career with raising her daughter, and became pastry chef at several top restaurants. Despite earning widespread acclaim, male owners and chefs refused to pay her fairly, she writes, and she eventually left restaurant work to cook at yoga retreats and other special events, “breaking away from the... toxic patriarchal culture” to work independently and reclaim “the right to cook and be in a kitchen in a way that felt right to me.” Donovan’s candid, passionate memoir will resonate with anyone who has worked in professional kitchens, and particularly women. (Aug.)
03/01/2020
An acclaimed pastry chef in some of the South's top kitchens and winner of a James Beard Award for her writing, Donovan survived a hardscrabble upbringing in a family anxious about its mixed-race background and dismissive of women. As a young mother, she was also abused. But she stuck with her career, finally listening to food doyenne Diana Kennedy's advice: "Stop letting men tell your story."
2020-04-28
The debut memoir of family and food from a renowned pastry chef and food writer.
Donovan, who received a James Beard Award for her work in Food & Wine, chronicles her career as a chef and her unrelenting passion for the culinary arts, but she also digs into her family history, offering keen reflections on the intersections of race and gender and spirited discussions of work, class, and opportunity. Donovan grew up in a mixed-race military family that featured both Southern and Mexican lineages, and she ably conveys the assimilationist pain of reckoning with the family pretense that it “was better to be invisible than to not be white.” From childhood to adulthood, the author unpacks her complex heritage through fascinating stories of trials, persistence, and success. At times, overly nostalgic flashbacks cloud the narrative—Donovan admits that she is “faulty for romanticizing all number of things. I know this about myself”—but a compelling voice holds everything together. The author integrates harrowing accounts of abuse, rape, abortion, marriage, and motherhood with discussions of her varied professional experiences, most of which have included workplace sexism. Donovan pointedly shows how women’s labor behind the scenes is often exploited to advance profits and egos. “Women are revered straight into abjection,” she writes, “useful only as a totem of inspiration. When we go to make that work our own, we are unable to survive in the industry the men built, the one they sell our wares within.” Occasionally, the author’s underdetailed representations flatten the impact of her experiences, but Donovan is to be commended for bringing exploitive work relationships to light while tackling the ego-driven world of celebrity chefs. As such, the book is not just a lively story of a talented pastry chef at the top of her game; it’s also a profoundly relatable memoir of the pervasive push back against female success.
A fresh voice with a recipe for empowerment.
With anger, honesty, wit and passion...an impeccable blend of deadpan humor, candor and righteousness, Donovan critiques not only the rampant sexism in haute cuisine, but also the misogyny prevalent in our culture at large, not shying away from depicting her experiences of domestic partner abuse, rape and gender-based pay disparity...Assertive and empowering”—Kathleen Rooney, Star Tribune
“Donovan documents her struggles in a male-dominated field, her mixed-race heritage, her own experience with abuse and assault and how she put her life back together through the salvation of food."—Zibby Owens, Good Morning America
“Donovan’s story is that of a pastry chef working her way up in an often inhospitable industry, but it’s also about a woman creating her own narrative and grappling with the ways that the choices of the women who came before her—both personally and professionally—affect her life." —Eater
"Donovan . . . reveals the struggles and hard-fought lessons that have made her the courageous woman that she is today. . . . [W]ritten in a fierce and visceral style. . . . In a world that all too often credits male chefs for the culinary contributions of women and people of color, [Our Lady of Perpetual Hunger] is a valuable addition to the culinary memoir canon." —Booklist
"Donovan… chronicles her career as a chef and her unrelenting passion for the culinary arts, but she also digs into her family history, offering keen reflections on the intersections of race and gender and spirited discussions of work, class, and opportunity. . . . [Our Lady of Perpetual Hunger] is not just a lively story of a talented pastry chef at the top of her game; it’s also a profoundly relatable memoir of the pervasive push back against female success. A fresh voice with a recipe for empowerment."— Kirkus
"[A] fiesty confessional. . . . Donovan’s candid, passionate memoir will resonate with anyone who has worked in professional kitchens, and particularly women."— Publishers Weekly
"Lisa Donovan’s writing has such intensity and assertiveness. It spikes the adrenaline and creates tension in a way that feels almost athletic. And it’s through this toned and visceral prose that we are forced to reckon with Lisa’s most essential recipe: that respect is bred from unflinching truth and raw honesty. In life, and on these pages, Lisa charts a path of personal growth with brave transparency, eloquently acknowledging that life’s greatest challenges are not circumstance, but a calling.”—Ashley Christensen, James Beard Award-winning chef
“The first time you meet Lisa you want to pull up a stool, pour a drink and listen to every story she has to tell. It turns out you don't need the stool or the drink. This is a woman you will be happy to get to know.” —Ruth Reichl, author of Save Me the Plums
"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
Lisa Donovan narrates her memoir with a firm hold on its meaning and implications. Other than an emotional moment in the acknowledgments, she reads in a pleasing storytelling voice that reveals the twists, turns, and switchbacks of her life as a pastry chef, wife, and mother. This audiobook owes more to the late Anthony Bourdain than to a chef/author like Boston’s Barbara Lynch in its revelations of the realities women encounter in restaurant work. Despite great success as a baker, she is underpaid, and she airs real grievances about the commodification of the business. Her story is also personal. To understand herself, she looks back at her grandmother’s cooking and life. Donovan writes well. Her prose often shimmers with sensory images and gustatory delights. A.D.M. © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine
Lisa Donovan narrates her memoir with a firm hold on its meaning and implications. Other than an emotional moment in the acknowledgments, she reads in a pleasing storytelling voice that reveals the twists, turns, and switchbacks of her life as a pastry chef, wife, and mother. This audiobook owes more to the late Anthony Bourdain than to a chef/author like Boston’s Barbara Lynch in its revelations of the realities women encounter in restaurant work. Despite great success as a baker, she is underpaid, and she airs real grievances about the commodification of the business. Her story is also personal. To understand herself, she looks back at her grandmother’s cooking and life. Donovan writes well. Her prose often shimmers with sensory images and gustatory delights. A.D.M. © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine
