One wild thing about signing a book deal is that after the writing and editing and designing have been completed, an author can never quite predict what the cultural climate will be when a publisher finally releases a book into the world.
“Our Lady of Perpetual Hunger” expounds on that essay and goes much further. Donovan connects her childhood to building her own family. She names names in chapters about her time in restaurants, but she doesn’t indulge in salacious gossip: She recounts shameful pay disparity and misogynistic kitchen culture to shine a light — to help point ways forward for an industry whose entrenched leadership styles and financial structures need to be rebuilt from the ground up.
Stepping away then from the restaurant business, I wanted these two defining interests to live together for a while. I assumed that I’d be writing about foodways and food traditions while also talking about the ways my generation came up in the South. Giants like Ruth Reichl and Gabrielle Hamilton have set beautiful examples about how to have conversations about their lives through food.
How has it been to put out a book at a time when a pandemic has pushed so many of our country’s systemic failures to the forefront? It’s why Sean [Brock] and I got into social media fights with each other publicly because I was so angry about the conversations no one was having at the time about how workers and laborers were being treated in restaurants. There are parts of this book that transcend a gender narrative and go straight to the heart of the nature of essential workers and how we take care of workers — or not — in this country. It goes far deeper than what one boss paid one worker a long time ago.