She also found out during the school year that she was vastly underpaid compared to comparable male teachers.īefore 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.Īnd, 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. As an unwed single mother, Donovan was lectured by the school's headmaster about what 'a bad influence' she'd be on the girls. 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.Ī few years later, Donovan landed a job teaching art at a conservative private girls school in Nashville. For the sake of her infant son, she caved to family pressure to give the relationship another try.

When she was barely out of high school, Donovan became pregnant by an abusive boyfriend.

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. 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. Because I'm not a foodie, I didn't know that before I picked up her memoir, which is in the M.F.K.

Here's a beaut of a sentence, one of many, from Lisa Donovan's new memoir, Our Lady of Perpetual Hunger: 'f someone values you only when you're about to walk out the door, you should definitely keep walking.'ĭonovan is a celebrated southern pastry chef.

Lady of perpetual hunger