Lisa Donovan, OUR LADY OF PERPETUAL HUNGER
[0:08]Hi, I'm Zibi Owens and you're listening to the award-winning podcast Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books.
[0:13]Please sign up for my newsletter at zibiowens.com for weekly updates about my podcasts, events, and more.
[0:20]Also, follow me on Instagram at zibiowens and also at Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books.
[0:26]And finally, join my virtual book club called Zibi's virtual book club, which meets every other Tuesday at 2 p.m.
[0:32]Eastern Time until 3 p.m. and features half an hour of book club discussion followed by 30 minutes of Q&A with the author whose book we've just discussed.
[0:41]You can sign up on my website zibiowens.com under the virtual book club section or even on Instagram, under the link in my bio.
[0:49]I hope you'll find me in all these different channels and enjoy this podcast.
[0:53]The sponsor for this whole Labor Day book last week is firstbook.org.
[0:58]Obviously, the pandemic is crippling education for millions of students, especially those in low-income communities.
[1:04]The widening digital divide and extended quote unquote summer slide due to COVID is devastating.
[1:10]Apparently, 40% lack access to reliable internet and functioning digital devices
[1:15]they can use for online learning, making the need for physical books and resources to prevent
[1:20]further educational backsliding absolutely critical. First book breaks down the barriers to education
[1:25]for children living in low-income communities. By providing its network of more than 475,000 educators,
[1:32]serving children in need with free and affordable new high-quality books, educational resources,
[1:38]and basic needs items through the award-winning first-book marketplace nonprofit e-commerce site.
[1:44]They need your support to ensure these children have what they need to learn during this
[1:48]critical time. Visit firstbook.org to help.
[1:51]Lisa Donovan is the debut author of our Lady of Perpetual Hunger. She has redefined what it means
[1:58]to be a southern baker as the pastry chef to some of the South's most influential chefs,
[2:03]including Margot McCormick, Tandy Wilson, and Sean Rock. Unabashedly serving her church cakes and pies
[2:09]to finish fine dining experiences, she has been informative in establishing a technique driven
[2:14]and historically rich narrative of southern pastry. Donovan received a James Beard Award for
[2:19]her writing in Food and Wine, where she is a regular contributor, and she has been a featured
[2:23]speaker at Bernard Zepi's globally renowned M.A.D. Mad Symposium. Hi. How are you? How are you?
[2:31]How are you? I'm glad. I'm glad. I mean, I admittedly have been so far at my own
[2:37]ass with this book for the last three or four years, but I'm just sort of like finding spaces
[2:44]where I'm like, I can't wait to read this blog and I can't wait to watch this. So I'm just glad
[2:49]to know of you now. All of the connections that get made when you come out with a book are really
[2:54]special. So you're out there. So nice. And I feel like I've gotten to know so many people,
[3:01]I mean, I used to be a big reader anyway, but not like this. Now, every memoir, every book I open,
[3:06]I get to know so much about people that our paths might not have crossed in life, but now look,
[3:11]it's like, I don't know. It's like magic. I love it. It feels like a really special kind of time
[3:15]in that arena. Like, I was just talking with someone. We were having like a little pre-interview and
[3:21]he happens to be a really good friend of mine. And we were just sort of kind of just talking. And I
[3:24]said, you know, one of the really great things about this has been making connections with
[3:29]other writers because there have been so many women, you know, writers who have written memoirs this
[3:36]and just like the ability to sort of, and they're all so different. Like, Phyllis Grant is a really
[3:42]great example of, you know, someone we kind of came out with memoirs that are very parallel.
[3:48]And we've kind of both like, we've never met, but we've kind of looked at each other like,
[3:52]how have we, I mean, obviously we know we were both doing what you just did this morning,
[3:56]which is like juggling it all and creating this career and creating these lives for ourselves
[4:02]and our families. And we kind of all are like coming out of the woods at the same time. Like,
[4:07]there you are. I knew you were out here. It was just too busy to define you. And now, you know,
[4:12]we're telling similar stories, but in really different ways. It's really special. It's really
[4:17]neat time. It's awesome. Even earlier today, I did a podcast with an author, Alyssa Schalaski,
[4:23]who wrote a book called Apron Anxiety. And it intersperses recipes and stories and Phyllis Grant
[4:29]also is one of my podcasts in you. And I'm like loving all these food memoirs, like growing
[4:36]up and experience. Anyway, it's just, if this is for real life, I would say, let's all get
[4:40]together. I'm going to do an event with you guys. But, you know, that's great. So I really hope
[4:45]that we can put a pin in all of those things and really make them happen next year. Because it's
[4:52]just, you know, I want this to not be sort of, it's been very nice and relaxing to be able to do
[4:58]this from, you know, my desk. And that's been kind of a nice sort of like energy restorative
[5:05]experience. Whereas the traveling, I've used to travel a lot as a chef. And it really starts to
[5:11]take its toll on you when you're traveling four and five times a month, especially when you're flying.
[5:15]So I was definitely getting a little thread bear in that way. But I really want next year to be
[5:21]sort of like, I'm trying to keep a little ledger of every time I say that or someone says that to me,
[5:26]like event with Zippy and Phyllis, and will you please put it in? I mean, we could do something now.
[5:31]I just feel like it's not, you know, it's not the same as like when you get a group together. And
[5:37]I love like pairing people who have so much to discuss. And I don't know. So please write it down.
[5:43]An energy in the room is so nice. You know, I'm really starting to miss that like,
[5:49]zeitgeist of people talking together and you know, an audience listening and admittedly at the
[5:56]beginning of this, I was like, I don't have to sit on a stage and talk about myself. And now I'm
[6:00]kind of like, but look at all these people that I can sit on a stage with and talk about what our
[6:05]work is, is, you know, it's going to be a great opportunity. So I'm keeping notes and trying to
[6:11]like remember all of the plans that we're dreaming of now and make them happen next year.
[6:17]Well, let me at the top of the list. Once the floodgates have opened and we can all come rushing
[6:22]forward and planning stuff. Yeah. Yeah. So tell me more about writing your book and tell me about
[6:29]when you decided your life would be a book. And then how did you take everything that happened
[6:34]and put it on the page? Well, you know, it's cliche. I think as it sounds, I think I'm one of those
[6:42]weird people that always was a writer. Like, even when I was a kid, I'm just, that's how I process
[6:48]things. I'm just a writer, whether I'm good or bad is to be determined. But like, that's how I
[6:54]process my experiences. And I, you know, did I ever think I was going to write a memoir of this
[7:02]caliber as far as like personal exposure goes? No. I'm not even close. What I think that there
[7:12]was a time in the world that changed and became available where I started to realize that
[7:19]I knew I was going to use, there are plenty of stories in my life that are great material for
[7:26]storytelling and that are good stories in and of themselves. I think in my head, I thought,
[7:31]well, that'll be for novel. That'll be for short stories. That'll be for screenplays. And
[7:35]that'll be for like my creative process later on life. I'll use all these interesting characters
[7:42]in different ways as a writer. And then, you know, the world sort of changed. I left the
[7:47]restaurant industry and had a real significant experience, a personal experience with myself. The
[7:55]word is getting so overused, but reckoning with myself of like the ways in which I, you know,
[8:03]tried to maneuver the world and the ways in which that was effective. And then also the ways in
[8:09]which I know it was damaging to me and other women around me. And the acquiescence is that we
[8:16]make and the stories we don't tell, the stories we don't even share amongst ourselves as women
[8:21]and how private and sort of shamefully secret a lot of these stories become for us as we move
[8:28]through the world and really started to take apart what the parallels were between the acquiescence's
[8:35]and sort of this very, you know, patriarchal infrastructure, patriarchal and racist system out in the
[8:41]world that we all try to like ladder climb in with this sort of self accountability of what I was
[8:49]doing to bring power to that world, you know, by keeping these things so private and carrying all of
[8:56]these things as if it were some sort of burden. My own life was a burden to the world, you know,
[9:03]and the space that I was going to take up with my stories was burdensome for the world. And so,
[9:09]you know, we get these ideas of the ways in which women are supposed to be accommodating.
[9:15]And I really started to get frustrated by the boundaries that I had to live in because I was
[9:22]playing that game of not being burdensome to the world. And, you know, and I wrote the essay about
[9:28]the restaurant industry and it, you know, it kind of got categorized as a sort of me to essay in the
[9:34]larger zeitgeist of the conversation that was happening at the time. And that was a moment for me,
[9:39]where like not only did I realize that how good it felt to get all of that language out of me,
[9:46]the response was really interesting to me. How much people seemed to need to hear those
[9:53]small stories that were contained within that essay was a real awakening for me. And it was a real
[9:58]moment for me to realize.
[10:00]there's power in telling our stories, you know, if there's power in talking about sexual assault,
[10:06]there's, you know, and at a time when, you know, it takes 40 women to bring one man down
[10:11]in our culture, you know, and that problem in our culture and society rests solely on the fact
[10:17]that we acquiesce and keep these stories to ourselves for so long. And, you know, there's no space
[10:24]for us to have the conversations about rape and abortion and about what it means to be
[10:29]a woman in all the ways, beautiful ways, connective ways, like, so, you know, it would just
[10:35]felt like a really great opportunity to finally share what was a very true experience for one
[10:43]woman in the world. And I think the more we can start kind of opening up those spaces,
[10:49]I think that's how we can create societal change about how we treat women in this country, you know.
[10:56]So yeah, I didn't realize I was going to ever write memoir in this capacity, but it happened.
[11:04]Here we are. And I look really forward to writing, you know, some fiction and things that are
[11:11]a little less making me feel completely exposed to the world. There's that level of it too of like,
[11:18]I do understand for me why this was important, but it's also difficult to lay it all out there
[11:24]you don't know. Yeah, there's a lot in there. I mean, that's like, I mean, some of the scenes
[11:29]I was just like, oh my gosh, Lisa, I can't believe it. The one with your ex and the baby on the bed,
[11:35]and when I won't go into it, but oh my god, I heart was breaking for you. And then the way that
[11:41]his mother even handled your relationship after and just all of it, it's just, anyway.
[11:47]And you know, the trick I think of those kinds of stories is how frequent and common they are,
[11:54]one or, you know, for people, women out in the world. And how I think, you know, here I was sort of
[12:02]this figure of note in my arena in my industry and viewed as someone who was known, you know,
[12:10]no nonsense and strong and independent and hardworking and created my own, you know,
[12:16]all of this sort of strong and dependent women tropes surrounded me. And I thought it's really kind
[12:25]of messed up that no one truly understands how a strong woman is built. They think that we just
[12:33]appear and that I really wanted to give some language to what creates and build these strong women
[12:43]out in the world. It's oftentimes, in fact, probably never ease and, you know, because they just
[12:50]plowed their way through, no, there was definitely something to build that strength and that power
[12:57]and the ability to manage greater circumstances that I think people just assume you were born with,
[13:04]you know. It's like people working out in the gym. I'm like envisioning this like muscle man type
[13:10]of weight area of a gym. Like you can walk in, people have different bass lines, right? But you
[13:16]have to go through the pain of lifting for anybody to get stronger, right? So you can be relatively
[13:22]strong. But in order to really get strong, you have to put in some sort of, you know, tissue
[13:27]breaking hard work and for emotional strength, it's exactly the same. Yeah, it has to come out of
[13:33]somewhere. You have to break something down to build it back up again. So yeah, totally. But I
[13:39]wish it hadn't have happened to you that way and all the rest. But I have to say, when I started
[13:45]reading your book, your table of contents and the way that you structured each chapter, the title
[13:51]and the accompanying like food or it was so brilliant that I like took a picture of that page and
[13:57]I have been meaning to post it. Of course, I haven't remembered to do so. But I love and I love like
[14:02]I get such a kick out of well structured and creative clever format. So I really loved how you did
[14:08]that. I wasn't sure if I was going to have chapter titles and then it just sort of started
[14:14]happening really naturally where I was, you know, each chapter sort of became an essay in and of
[14:22]itself. And the two, the two words that had each chapter sort of became for me almost like an outline
[14:29]and it kind of just helped me stay on both a thematic sort of structure as well as like a feeling
[14:38]of that time, you know. And yeah, I'm glad you said that. Thank you because it felt it just sort
[14:44]of came about naturally. And I was like, well, just keep it. I loved it. When you were writing,
[14:50]like take me through the writing process, like now you had these titles. Did you have a list of
[14:54]all of them first and then you filled it in or as each one came and like what was the writing
[14:59]process like? Like, did you were you sitting right there or where did you write all this and
[15:03]where I did all and sometimes like on the ground in a puddle. You know, the writing process was,
[15:10]you know, for some have ever done anything this big. I've written a lot of essays and I've written
[15:14]a lot of larger formats sort of things, but I've never written a book. Obviously it's my first book.
[15:19]It was an interesting process because I had to learn to be messy and that's not something I'm good
[15:24]at, you know, I'm not good at. I can be I am messy in my creative efforts, but I oftentimes
[15:32]don't share that. And the part that was so hard about the writing process for me was presenting
[15:38]disastrous work to my editor so that we could work out of it, you know. And that, you know, so
[15:44]I spent a lot of time in those early months of starting this book being really like
[15:50]cloistered in my like and really trying to edit myself before I gave it to my editor and it took me
[15:56]some time. And that's just a result. I'm pretty sure of working in a pretty high stress kitchen
[16:01]being a pastry chef. Like my standards for what I'm willing to present are very high,
[16:08]you know, and like I hold myself to a very high sort of like standard when I'm engaging with
[16:14]another professional. So like in a kitchen, for example, you work on, if you're the pastry chef,
[16:20]if you're a cook or a sous chef, it's a little different. But as the pastry chef, as the chef of my
[16:26]department, I would get ideas and I would do all of that messy work very privately, you know,
[16:32]and I would like figure it out and and do the math and make all the equations work. And then
[16:39]when I had something that felt as close to finished as possible, that's when I would say,
[16:45]handy, you guys, to taste this. It's going on the menu soon. And then I would take notes and then
[16:49]I would, you know, tweak and do that kind of stuff. And I think I went into this book with that,
[16:56]idea of like this is I have to get this right before I show it to her. So it took me some time to get
[17:01]out of that training that my brain was used to. And once she, you know, she brought me closer and
[17:08]she was like, you just got a brain dump, brain dump brain dump. So there was a lot of stories that
[17:14]just came out and I just let them come out. And then we found our structure from there, you know,
[17:19]of like, look, what's our overall conversation here? And for me, it was really important to
[17:25]make sure that the conversation was significantly and nearly entirely about how women engage and
[17:34]find and love and care for each other and all of the complexities of that. I'm really intrigued
[17:40]and by the ways in which women move around this world together. There feels like a,
[17:46]there, it feels like we are all part of sort of this, you know, it makes me think of what's in the
[17:52]ocean, the channel that kind of moves through the Gulf Coast, the Gulf Street, right? It kind of
[17:59]feels like we all have this similar movement around this world. And we all are tethered to this
[18:06]way of experiencing and communicating. And there's something really powerful about that. And there's
[18:12]also something very painful about that because of these shared experiences and traumas and things
[18:19]that we experience as women that, you know, frankly men, you know, I think can understand on some
[18:27]level. It's not like men do not experience trauma, but I think women have very different experiences
[18:32]in the world. And we're tethered together in all of these ways. And so that to me was like,
[18:38]I really wanted to talk about the complexities in which women move through this world together.
[18:45]And alone. And so everything sort of became, is it useful to have this, you know, is this story
[18:52]useful to that bigger picture of sort of talking about the complexities of how women engage with
[18:57]one another and also what I'm hoping to sort of pass to my own daughter, you know, and how I'm
[19:03]hoping to sort of leave her with less of all of this sort of generational undoing and
[19:11]unlearning. I, you know, really, I think that is a huge priority for me. And that was a huge
[19:15]party for the book. So also just sort of keeping to those themes. And then I think structurally
[19:20]what happened was I just started taking each chapter like a, like it was its own short story or
[19:26]short essay, you know, like its own essay. So then, you know, after we sort of compartmentalized it
[19:32]that way, we started to sort of do a little bit of weaving so that they didn't feel so chopped.
[19:37]Like it didn't feel like a, hopefully like a short story collection. Like what we wanted was
[19:42]to sort of weave them together. So there were some, you know, it was an evolution of how we could
[19:47]best get all of these things to sort of work as a whole. It was a really beautiful experience in
[19:52]both of two editors and they're both women. And it was just this really special, really truly
[19:58]wonderful experience.
[20:00]It's been a really, I mean, Penguin Press has been one of,
[20:03]I think, the most remarkable experiences of my life,
[20:06]and I hope I keep, can write for them forever.
[20:08]I mean, it's a really special house,
[20:10]and I'm very proud to be one of their writers.
[20:13]They have taken such good care of this book.
[20:16]I can't even tell you, it's amazing to me.
[20:19]So glad, that's wonderful.
[20:20]So has your daughter read the book?
[20:23]Parts.
[20:23]She's 15, she'll be 16 in a few weeks.
[20:28]She, you know, I think she's picking it up
[20:30]and putting it down, picking it up and putting it down.
[20:32]And, you know, I think they're nervous.
[20:34]Both of my kids are a little nervous.
[20:36]You know, my son is 20, and he's like,
[20:39]mom, I love you, and I, you know,
[20:41]we had a lot of talks before as I was sort of writing
[20:44]these stories just about like his comfort level
[20:47]and what he was comfortable with me sharing.
[20:50]Cause it's for a while, it was mine in his experience, you know,
[20:53]and he's like, no, I don't feel like that was my experience.
[20:57]I feel like this is holy, your experience,
[20:59]you weren't really hard to make this not a thing I even have
[21:02]to recall.
[21:03]So I feel so incredibly far removed from any of these stories.
[21:08]So, you know, he was fully supportive,
[21:11]but he's also not quite ready to read the book, you know.
[21:15]He's like, I think there are just some things
[21:17]I'm not ready to know.
[21:18]Yeah.
[21:19]And so I'm like, that is totally fair.
[21:22]And Maggie has, you know, read.
[21:24]I don't think she's read it all the way through,
[21:26]but she's cherry picked some chapters.
[21:28]So, and I don't, I actually don't think she's made it
[21:31]to the last chapter, which is interesting
[21:34]because that's the part that like, you know,
[21:36]when my husband read it, he just was, you know, sobbing.
[21:40]And he's like, I can't wait for, he, I'm gonna cry.
[21:43]But he was like, this is such a gift for her.
[21:46]And it's gonna be something that she keeps, you know,
[21:49]she can revisit her whole life, like it exists forever now.
[21:54]and she can look at this when she's 70 and know, like,
[21:58]this is, this was something you felt
[22:00]when she was growing up and it's like the best gift.
[22:04]And I was like, oh, my God.
[22:05]Oh, he's not really think about that, you know,
[22:10]you're not really thinking about your audience.
[22:13]And so there was a lot of like retroactive,
[22:17]if you think about your audience too much,
[22:19]you'll never write the book, you know,
[22:21]you'll never, like, you'll just be obsessed
[22:24]with like who's going to think what of what
[22:27]and you're gonna, you know.
[22:29]And as much as I tried to, you know,
[22:31]I was really important to me to not blame anybody
[22:36]or indict anyone, even people that deserved blaming
[22:39]and indictment, you know, it was really important for me
[22:42]for this to be about my own work,
[22:44]my own internalized undoing and unlearning
[22:47]and really taking some things apart.
[22:49]That yes, I can assign blame to, you know,
[22:52]I think my grandfather takes the biggest hit here, you know,
[22:55]but it was really important to me to make this about
[22:58]what I learned and how I moved forward
[23:00]from these experiences and like, you know,
[23:03]so yeah, I hope that the messaging kind of makes its way
[23:08]with ease, you know, but there's always, you know,
[23:11]there's always more time to write books, hopefully.
[23:15]Are you thinking, are you already thinking about your next book?
[23:19]Yeah, memoir fiction?
[23:22]No, one memoir is enough.
[23:26]I mean, you know, maybe if I can,
[23:28]I shouldn't say that, you know,
[23:30]the next memoir doesn't have to be, you know, quite so guttural,
[23:35]like a little, you know, and I think about Ruth Ryschel
[23:39]and Nora Afron sort of, I think everything will always
[23:43]be a little, obviously reflective of my own life.
[23:47]And I think there's so, that I value that so much
[23:50]and how women tell stories and, you know,
[23:53]a plenty of material to use.
[23:56]I'm working on some other projects
[23:59]that are not nonfiction.
[24:01]So it's exciting for me to sort of take,
[24:04]take these stories and have a little bit more freedom, you know,
[24:08]because there's some, you know, lots of rules with memoir.
[24:13]You have to really hold yourself accountable
[24:16]and every, well, you hold yourself accountable,
[24:18]hopefully as a writer anyway,
[24:20]but you're holding yourself accountable to truth
[24:23]and fact and data.
[24:24]And you worry about, you know, am I getting this right?
[24:29]You know, am I remembering, you know,
[24:31]I was talking with Dave Chang on his podcast last week
[24:34]and he wrote a beautiful memoir
[24:38]and he sent it to his sister and his sister,
[24:41]like emails him saying, David, I love you.
[24:44]I don't remember it this way at all,
[24:46]but I'm glad that you had a space to write it.
[24:49]And there's that experience of, you know,
[24:52]what truth lives in each experience for each individual.
[24:56]And so you're sort of faced with that reality of like,
[25:00]you're everyone's having their own personal moment
[25:04]that is very different than the person standing next to you.
[25:07]And so, you know, memoir keeps you in these really rigid,
[25:11]you know, boundaries of making sure
[25:14]you're holding accountability to truth.
[25:17]Whereas if you're doing nonfiction,
[25:19]you have a lot more freedom
[25:20]and you get to, you know, you get to play a little bit more,
[25:23]but it was a good first exercise.
[25:26]And I, you know, eventually, maybe I'll write more memoir.
[25:29]I would love that.
[25:30]And, you know, I've gotten all the hard stuff out of the way,
[25:32]hopefully not going away, you know.
[25:36]So, but right now it feels really good
[25:38]to be in a space where the creative part of my brain
[25:43]really gets to play and create character profiles
[25:47]and, you know, and what is your relationship like these days
[25:51]to baking and chef dumb and creating and cooking and all of that?
[25:56]Oh, you know, it's always going to be my first love, you know?
[26:02]I mean, writing is so much a part of who I am
[26:04]that it doesn't even feel like a vocation or a hobby.
[26:07]Like it feels so much a part of, again,
[26:10]just sort of how I process and move through the world.
[26:13]And baking has, I think, really truly one of the first,
[26:17]like vocations and crafts and tactile work
[26:21]that I fell so in love with that, like I recognize in my husband,
[26:26]like he's a ceramicist and like his affinity and his education
[26:30]and his passion for the material is so familiar to me
[26:34]and the way that baking feels for me.
[26:37]It will always be in that.
[26:39]It will always be that for me.
[26:40]I will always have a very deep visceral response
[26:43]and connectivity to baking.
[26:46]I, you know, the food world is in a hard place right now.
[26:50]The in a great place in some ways
[26:53]they're having really important conversations
[26:56]about food justice and all of these things
[26:58]are incredibly important and timely and necessary.
[27:02]And I'm not to say like I'm piecing out
[27:05]because it's getting hard.
[27:06]That's not what I'm saying.
[27:07]I just, I feel like it's a good time to,
[27:11]I don't know, let some younger people have the space
[27:15]in that world, you know?
[27:16]And there's a lot of really great energy happening
[27:20]from like the 20 to 35 year olds coming up
[27:24]and they've got a lot to say.
[27:25]And I am so happy to sit in here
[27:30]what they are bringing to the table.
[27:31]And I don't know that you ever age
[27:34]out of a conversation like that,
[27:36]but I am also self-aware enough to know
[27:39]that I'm learning a lot from these younger writers
[27:42]in the food space.
[27:44]And this quarantine has been a really great opportunity
[27:47]to like chill out and listen and read and learn, you know?
[27:51]And some of it I'm really excited about
[27:55]and some of it, you know, I think is still needs some work.
[27:58]You know, so, but you know, I am really glad
[28:03]to be in a space where I've kind of earned the opportunity
[28:06]to do work in a different way.
[28:09]You know, I was always out in the streets.
[28:11]I was always, you know, frontline of the heart conversations
[28:15]and I'm not scared of those things,
[28:16]but I'm also sort of getting to an age now
[28:19]where I wanna do something that's a little bit more dedicated
[28:22]to something that builds and cultivates
[28:26]and even in a really private way, you know?
[28:29]And I'm getting really comfortable
[28:32]with wholly being a writer, not a chef writer.
[28:36]And, you know, I think it's been a real joy
[28:40]and partially a relief to hear people say
[28:43]that's shouldn't even be in a food memoir category.
[28:45]This is just, you know, it's hard to even call you a chef now
[28:49]because your writing, you know, seems to be so much your focus.
[28:53]And that's been really nice to hear
[28:55]because that sort of been my goal is to, you know,
[28:58]you can't cook in a kitchen forever.
[29:00]And I, you know, I never made sense with the banks
[29:03]or the investors of how to open my own space.
[29:06]And in this time, I'm really glad, you know,
[29:09]that I'm not saddled with trying to, you know,
[29:12]I have so many of my best friends are trying to keep things,
[29:16]you know, from just completely falling apart,
[29:18]you know, right now.
[29:19]And it's a really hard time to be a chef
[29:22]and a restaurant tour.
[29:23]And so I think this time has really given me
[29:28]this lockdown this quarantine time has just given,
[29:30]I think a lot of people, the space to really refocus,
[29:35]you know, like what their intentions might have been
[29:39]before life kind of carried them away, you know.
[29:44]And I feel like I'm in that space.
[29:45]And, you know, what I'm really,
[29:48]I don't think I ever would have given myself permission
[29:51]to stop cooking in, you know, as a private chef
[29:55]or doing consulting or developing recipes
[29:58]unless the world had sort of made me.
[30:00]stop. And just this little amount of time away from my perpetual insecurity of like not losing
[30:09]potential income. And that even turned, this time has even turned like that on its head
[30:16]where you realize we don't need as much as we thought, you know, we actually need a lot less
[30:24]than we, you know, we're working so hard for. And if the trade-off is, you know, getting to
[30:31]work in my yards, you know, 10 hours a week or getting to go on long walks with my husband or
[30:38]cuddling up with the dog for an hour a day like, okay, I'm down, I guess a good trade
[30:47]so yeah, I think my relationship to the food world is one that will always exist. But I
[30:53]definitely can actively say I'm working hard so that I can just write full time. And again,
[31:00]like I'll probably always write about food in some way or my experience as I just chef, because
[31:05]I think that's the well from which I draw my writing material. But I, you know, I want it to
[31:12]transcend sort of this food media conversation. I'm growing less interested in that and
[31:19]more interested in making something beautiful out of the same kinds of conversations and
[31:24]sort of making more cultural experiences for people than hard-nosed like fuck it all, you know.
[31:34]That's starting to feel less useful to me than it wants to, you know, so.
[31:40]Well, Lisa, thank you. Thank you so much for coming on Momstone to read books. Thank you for
[31:44]sharing all of your amazing thoughts. I feel like I could listen to you of such like a
[31:49]soothing, like centered voice. And I feel like I could sit here and listen to you forever. So
[31:55]I don't know, maybe a podcast in your future. I feel like you should make it on the road, you know,
[32:00]that could be really fun for you as a world is all of our oysters now. We're just kidding.
[32:04]Yeah, right. We would not happen. But everyone else. Well, I know.
[32:09]It will have a great day. And it was so nice to talk to you. And please keep our event on the top of
[32:14]your list. I know. And we will do it. And now it'll be like one of my post quarantine goals. So
[32:22]all right, well good. Take care of yourself. Thank you too.
[32:29]Thanks so much to firstbook.org for sponsoring this Labor Day book blast. Please consider giving
[32:34]to firstbook.org to help their network of 475,000 educators serving children in need.
[32:41]Thanks for listening to this episode of Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books. Don't forget to
[32:45]follow me on Instagram at zebi Owens and at Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books. Also sign
[32:50]up for my newsletter at zebiowens.com and sign up for my virtual book club and meet lots of authors
[32:55]on Zoom every other week. Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan at Texture Sound for the sound editing.
[33:00]And thank you to Morning Moon Productions for providing this fantastic intro and outro music.