Recent Food Memoirs I've Loved. Next Up: Our Lady of Perpetual Hunger by Lisa Donovan

As I mentioned earlier this week, I’ve been working on a food memoir. While doing that, I’ve been taking a deep dive into recently published food memoirs. Here’s another one I’ve recently read and admired:

Our Lady of Perpetual Hunger, by Lisa Donovan

Lisa Donovan grew up in a struggling family in the South; just as she's ready to head off to college — dreaming of her future apartment with a view of the university's campanile — she finds out she's pregnant. This memoir chronicles her journey as a young single mother in the male-dominated restaurant industry and her rise to pastry-chef renown — in spite of domestic abuse and sexual violence in her personal life and blatant sexism in her professional life.

Through it all, baking was her salvation.

Just kidding! Thankfully Donovan is a much more complex and interesting writer and life-chronicler than that; she resists facile feel-goods. While there's plenty of joy in the great food she creates, she's not going to lie: You can't live on talent, great effort, and beautiful pastries alone, especially when, at the height of her career as a sought-after pastry chef, she was still only making $15 an hour.

Her salvation is wrought partly through long hours, passion (in both pastry and writing), a legacy of strength from her family's matriarchs, and a marriage to a truly good man -- an artist and an equal partner who left a comfy career in academia to struggle right along with her as she chased after her dream.

With grittiness and candor, Donovan chronicles what it's like to be hard-working, notably gifted, yet constantly poor -- the plight of so many kitchen workers (even when hovering near the top of the staff hierarchy, as she was). In the end, I was left to wonder: Why, in a food-obsessed culture like ours, do so few people in the restaurant industry make a decent living?

It’s a must-read for anyone who who cares passionately about our culinary landscape.