In her Our Lady of Perpetual Hunger, James Beard Award-winning pastry chef Lisa Donovan catalogues the bumpy, difficult path she took in her career: "a steep, uphill climb, with a baby on my hip, and then two, and an early-onset high expectation for my life that I was not willing to forsake."
One part career story, one part food memoir and one part personal reckoning, Our Lady of Perpetual Hunger is so much more than the expected juicy details about life in the fast-paced, demanding kitchens of Sean Brock's Husk in Charleston and Nashville's City House. While Donovan speaks to the role that baking played in saving her life, both literally (providing a career path by which she could provide for her family) and figuratively (giving her hands something to do as she processed abuse, sexual assault and familial relationships over the years), the heart of her work is in her grappling with her story of herself: her womanhood, her motherhood, her family legacy, her race, her place in the South. She recounts the sacrifices she made in the name of her career, only to realize she wasn't willing to make them. She weaves her story together with an excoriating analysis of toxic masculinity and the legacies of white privilege to great effect, celebrating the power of food while examining the ways that the food industry has subverted the very notion of community it claims to celebrate.
Like Donovan's famous desserts, Our Lady of Perpetual Hunger takes simple ingredients--a woman's life, a journey into motherhood, a romance, a family legacy--and transforms them into something delectable, delicious and downright inspiring. --Kerry McHugh, freelance writer