Our Lady of Perpetual Hunger

An excerpt for Friday

Last week I mentioned that I read an excerpt for the SouthWord Literary Festival in Chattanooga - and further mentioned that the section I read was an anchor for my entire memoir. I have thought a lot about the importance of this piece since writing that on Monday and thought you might like to see it here, in case you haven’t read my book (or maybe you have and don’t mind revisiting).

This essay was written in 2010 or so. Maybe a year or two later, as time is a funny little bitch who messes more and more with my mind as I grow older. But it makes me think of two things, actually.

It reminds me that I was writing this book for years before a book deal came down the pipeline and that, when I am feeling a bit rudderless, I somehow always know I am building toward something - remembering that work sometimes takes years, decades, to take shape feels really important to me in this moment.

The other thing this essays does is it helps me recognize a dedication to a clear goal - this is the invisible work of being an artist of any kind. People are very (very!) quick to assume that you just stumbled upon an opportunity in this world - that maybe just charmed your way into success. This essay reminds me that I was dedicated to this work, even while I was incapable of making it into any kind of opportunity, and was working hard with my agent to seek opportunities to fit my goal and that it took YEARS (seven to be exact) before he felt like he could make me a deal that suited my writing. I was surprised to hear a friend and writer I love and respect, who loves and respects me back, express surprise at hearing me say that I had been cultivating the idea for this book and waiting it out/passing up cookbook offers for years because this was the book I wanted to publish first. I guess it looked, from the outside, like I just walked out of a kitchen and into a successful writing career. Which feels like unhinged thinking to me - because any writer can tell you, this is a grueling business no matter how you slice it. This piece reminds me that I knew what I was working so hard for and I had intense focus on making it happen, to the tune of walking away from many, many other opportunities in order to see it through.

Anyway, I say that not because I care so much what other people think or to brag about my insane singular vision (is that really a brag, ha!), but to encourage any writer or artist out there that feels like this is somehow easy or breezy for anyone, it is not. It takes time. And a second or third job. And a willingness to walk away from as many things as you can/need to keep your vision on your front burner - or at least on regular rotation to the front burner. To my knowledge, not many people who actually aspire to live and work as writers just tap dance into any feasible career or publishing deal with a house they love overnight. The idea that they do is laughable.

Also, one more thing: “just write” is only half true. Yes, write. But also, putting yourself out into the world helps - knowing people who are also grinding away at the craft you live for never hurts and always makes life more palatable and functional. Tuning out the haters is key - and boy will there be haters the second you finally arrive at a place where you might have options. People don’t like to see you succeed at things they gave up on or feel they worked harder than you at - it’s a weird human condition some people can’t shake but it’s really good when you learn it about someone as those are the people you immediately need to cut out of your life.

And mostly, overall and eventually, when you are still grinding away at the thing and maybe feeling a bit directionless, it feels important to take time to remember how you did it before. Cause it will likely be how you do it again. I’m reminding myself today of that very thing.

Excerpt below. Thanks for reading.

Love, L

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Our Lady of Perpetual Hunger:

Excerpt from Chapter 9 / Cornmeal (Hunger).

John and I were merely a tag team between working and

childcare. If he was home, I was working. If I was home, he was work‐

ing. That was how we spent the first ten years of our marriage. Dur‐

ing those early years, I started to discover things about myself, found

myself in kitchens more than I wrote, found myself in libraries look‐

ing over baking books again while the kids watched puppet shows and

played in the courtyard. I found myself attaching to the idea of food as

something that mattered beyond physical sustenance or a few extra

dollars on the weekend. I could not have known then that the deep

hunger I felt for my life, for answers, for survival, for providing well

for my children from a place that felt honest would create such a de-

finitive bigger picture. I didn’t realize I was inching my way toward a

career that would define so much about who I became as a mother and

as a woman, much less as a person in my community.

We were dangerously teetering toward the edge of poverty, taking

the car seats out of the car each night in case the car got repossessed,

paying medical bills five dollars per month just to keep from being de‐

stroyed by Equifax, counting pocket change for gas money. We were

working harder than ever before, but the middle class in our country

was disappearing and the cost of living was going up and our pay‐

checks were staying the same. It all led to a seminal moment in our

story—the kind of moment when something was going to have to

give. We had a five-​­month-​­old daughter, a five-​­year-​­old son, a dog,

two cats, and a hamster named Burnt Waffle, and rented a third-​­floor,

one-​­bedroom walk‐up approximately five blocks from the piss-­ and

Red Bull–soaked college bar called Jacksons (now an expensive park‐

ing lot), where I was actualizing my worst nightmare as a cocktail waitress to trust-​­fund frat boys and too-​­skinny sorority girls who

thought the dumber they sounded, the sexier they were. I learned how

to effectively mop up a floor at 3:30 a.m. after approximately two hun‐

dred college kids had spent their parents’ money on multiple vodka

drinks and deep-​­fried cookie-​­dough eggrolls. Most nights I found

myself calculating the physics of vomit and how to rid my world of it

as quickly as possible.

Every night, though, between 10:30 and 10:45 p.m., I would sneak

off to the bathroom. Here was fifteen minutes during which I would

go into a stall, try to restore my faith in myself, and remember what I

was working for. I usually entered with a furrowed brow and a bit of a

quiver in my lip, but there was also a kind of sanctity in that time that

I now recognize as lifesaving. There were two stalls, and the left one

was mine every night for twelve or even sometimes a luxurious fifteen

minutes. The right stall was roomier, but it was a catfight to get to

it—that stall became a dressing room, a makeshift bedroom, a refuge

after too many drinks, a burlesque of so many young girls, girls my

age, who were figuring out all the things their bodies could do alone,

together, sober, drunkenly.

The smaller stall ended up being more useful to me in the long run,

my experiences being very different from those girls in the right stall.

I had my own specific needs. I could stand on the toilet seat (there were

no lids), pop a mad squat, and lean my back on the cleanest part of the

wall behind the toilet. In this squatted position, I could rest my elbows

on my knees and get into position. Each breast would get a less-​­than-​

adequate 6–7 minutes, but it was enough to relieve the pressure. The

breast pump was a manual one—meaning I had to pump myself like I

was doing simultaneous hand-​­stress workouts: one hand on the pump

handle, squeezing feverishly, and the other hand on my raging-​­hot,

overly engorged, incredibly painful breast, squeezing as gently as I could. It sounded like a wagon wheel that needed greasing, each

squeeze in half-​­second intervals: “squeak . . . squeak . . . squeak”—

while the carnival of lipstick, cocaine, orgasm kaleidoscope rotated in

and out of the right stall. My breast milk felt so dirty—simply because

of the things the next-​­door neighbors brought each night—that I al‐

ways threw it out and started fresh when I walked in my apartment

door for Maggie Donovan’s four a.m. feeding.

After I closed down the bar on the night when the right stall af‐

forded me my very first voyeuristic lesbian experience as I “squeak . . .

squeak . . . squeak” excreted my baby’s milk and listened to what had

to be the metal wall trash can being torn off the wall in the wake of a

series of groans, giggles, cigarette drags, and the eventual fumble with

tangled bras (both theirs and mine), followed by a somber four more

hours of serving appletinis, I walked home. For once I was not dis‐

gusted or put out by my stall neighbors. They seemed like women I

could have been friends with, based solely on their intermittent con‐

versations between all the fingering and giggling. I felt a sadness, a

loss of youth, a loss of experiences, a realization that even though I had

no regrets about my life and the choices I had made, things maybe just

didn’t have to be so hard. That maybe in some parallel universe I was

kissing a girl in a bathroom stall for the first time, or riding in a car

with loud music while smoking cigarettes with a handsome boy who

wanted to take me somewhere to have his way with me in the dark.

I was very tired. We were very broke. Things felt impossible in a

way that they had not before. I was twenty-​­six years old, felt like I had

no potential career path, and in that moment, felt like I had nothing

but hot breasts with leaky nipples and dirty sneakers to call my own. I

let myself have a one-​­off pity party, and that four a.m. shuffle home in

the dark summer heat was bleak, to say the least. I dragged my body,

feeling as if it weighed twice its amount, up three flights of wooden, faded teal stairs, trying to allow a feeling a sweetness for myself and

for how my lean legs in green sneakers and a white eyelet skirt looked

so pretty against the peeling sea-​­foam paint in that staircase. I sat on

the stoop outside my apartment door and tried to collect myself and

force some kind of feeling of “good” before I walked into my home to

feed my daughter. I admired my legs again, thinking about how strong

they were. And then the music started.

One of the perks of living in Nashville is that no matter how low

you get in your life, or what odd hour it is, chances are you’ll stumble

across some kind of beautiful music to remind you of how lucky you

are to have the gift of all your senses. The reward for making it up

those stairs on painfully tired legs was knowing that I could sit on that

top step and, if I lingered long enough, get to listen to my across-​­the-​

hall neighbor play her piano. Holly was Hank Williams’s grand‐

daughter, and she never let me down when I needed her the most, even

at four a.m.

I leaned my back against my door and sat with her piano for as

long as I could. Suddenly, I remembered something else that brought

me a sliver of joy: I was to expect a package that day, my mom had

said. My dad’s baby sister, Aunt Barbara, a book broker and collector,

regularly sent me boxes upon boxes of books. They would come in

bulk: cookbooks, art books, Joan Didion books; she sent me all my

favorite things, gifts that, especially at this time in my life, felt quite

literally lifesaving for me. That night I walked in to just one lone book,

though. It had been wrapped in a brown paper bag with my maiden

name written in black Sharpie and then scratched out with a pencil, an

arrow pointing to the proper name “Donovan” written in red ink to the right of the pencil scratches. As I pulled back the wrapping, I saw

the words: How to Cook a Wolf.

I found M. F. K. Fisher and How to Cook a Wolf during a time

when, truly and intensely, that guy, the wolf, was at my door: fangs,

claws, hunger, and all. While we were happy, we were also starting to

feel a desperation that most people would have not suffered through.

With all our ideals about living on our terms, the reality was that we

were working harder than anyone we knew because we had to and

yielding far less. I’ve never had a place to fall, I don’t have a rich daddy

to bail me out of anything, failure was not a thing I could accept. We

hadn’t chosen a life as entitled kids who had a safety net. In fact, if I

know myself, I bet I clung to those high ideals to make myself feel as

if it were a choice, romanticizing our bohemian ideas about being art‐

ists. But, truthfully, we were working our asses off because we had to

in that moment for, not just a future yield, but a very immediate one,

and things had gotten to a point where money was so tight and things

felt so impossible that we could not work hard enough to get by, no

matter how many shifts I pulled, no matter how much bread I baked,

no matter if John took a third job as a Domino’s delivery driver. We

were the adults and our kids needed new shoes. After that long and

dire walk home, the one where I seriously started questioning myself,

it felt remarkable to arrive home to find written words about living

without, building from nothing, giving from a place of not having. It

helped me define how to live and thrive and grow, not as a chef but as

a woman, a mother, a human being.

That night, I scooped up the used copy, went to get my daughter

out of her crib, and with tears in my eyes from the night I had just had

and the pain from the engorged breasts that had crept up on me while

I sat on the stairwell stoop—not to mention the sense of loss I felt for a lot of things at the moment—I held a hungry baby to nurse on my

lap, and I read these words:

There’s a whining at the threshold,

There’s a scratching at the floor.

To work! To work! In Heaven’s name

The wolf is at the door!

I read the entire book in the early morning with my daughter alter‐

nating between sleeping and nursing in my arms, putting the book

down as the sun started rising. And then I read it again every morning

at that same time for many days in a row, each time renewed by the

time my son woke up to make him a beautiful breakfast of grits with

sorghum and butter, sweet so he would love it, and one hard-​­boiled

egg, feeling like a champion. There was heart in those meals, and fla‐

vor. There was something instinctual in me that Fisher poked, breathed

life into. She spoke to my writer’s sensibilities. She spoke to the idea

that, even though it felt like we had “nothing,” the romance of life actu‐

ally comes from the refusal to be kept in the dark and craggy corners

where we are sometimes put or kept. Fisher wrote simply about creat‐

ing beauty from nothing by finding and preserving that ever-​­important

generosity of spirit, even when you have so little.

This whole thing, this career, started as I worked my way out of

nearly desperate times, hungry times as a mother and wife and woman

in the world trying to create a life for myself and my family that I be‐

lieved in. Fisher’s work was my bible when I had mouths to feed. And,

like any good bible, it fed me stories of how I could do more, be more,

and see more in my muck and mire, the life stuff that feels at once hard

and important. Stretching the food, stretching my need for it, and finding beauty in feeding others when I was both spiritually and phys‐

ically hungry myself, was a pivotal moment of understanding for me,

and it became the foundation for my life and career. Her words and

ideas collided with a mounting desperation I was feeling. What came

out was a grace that I had no idea existed in me.

My early journey with food was getting to know that proverbial

wolf at the door—the one that all the good writers and singers talk

about—in the most intimate and dreadful way. He’s a real thing, that

guy, that wolf. He comes into your life, he lies in wait for any misstep

that might allow him to pounce, he reminds you every day that you’re

potentially at his mercy. He tries to scare you into giving up. He nearly

wins. Reckoning with him brought me to a strong realization I’d

never had before and will likely never have again: I could walk—even

in an exhausted, milk-​­engorged stupor—straight into an understand‐

ing with myself about what my life had the potential to mean.

I was shown my childhood on a page. I had to grow up a little to

see that this story, this whole conversation about giving of yourself, is

the story of my mother, likely your mother, your grandmother, my

grandmother, me. How to Cook a Wolf is not just a generationally spe‐

cific way to talk about how to survive hard times, postwar rationing,

and community-​­crop sharing. It is the story of how women are boun‐

tiful and generous in the face of loss and desperation and need. This

story about how we have all been saving one another as women for‐

ever is the one that I never knew how to admit was already in my

bones because of my mother and her mother and my aunts and how

they saved us the best way they knew how.

I began to make my life’s work out of the spirit of that text. It

started with my babies, and it slowly stretched itself out into my com‐

munity until I found myself knee deep in the throes of a career I never

planned yet felt completely destined for.