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Title details for Our Lady of Perpetual Hunger by Lisa Donovan - Available

Our Lady of Perpetual Hunger

A Memoir

by Lisa Donovan
Lisa Donovan
Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
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1 of 1 copy available
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, NPR
Noted 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.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    August 4, 2020

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9780593211342
      • File size: 226197 KB
      • Duration: 07:51:14

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      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
    • Publisher's Weekly

      May 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.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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