milk fed by melissa broder

Publisher: Scribner Page Count: 304 Publication Date: Feb. 2, 2021

Synopsis: A scathingly funny, wildly erotic, and fiercely imaginative story about food, sex, and god from the acclaimed author of The Pisces and So Sad Today.

Rachel is twenty-four, a lapsed Jew who has made calorie restriction her religion. By day, she maintains an illusion of existential control, by way of obsessive food rituals, while working as an underling at a Los Angeles talent management agency. At night, she pedals nowhere on the elliptical machine. Rachel is content to carry on subsisting—until her therapist encourages her to take a ninety-day communication detox from her mother, who raised her in the tradition of calorie counting.

Early in the detox, Rachel meets Miriam, a zaftig young Orthodox Jewish woman who works at her favorite frozen yogurt shop and is intent upon feeding her. Rachel is suddenly and powerfully entranced by Miriam—by her sundaes and her body, her faith and her family—and as the two grow closer, Rachel embarks on a journey marked by mirrors, mysticism, mothers, milk, and honey.

Pairing superlative emotional insight with unabashed vivid fantasy, Broder tells a tale of appetites: physical hunger, sexual desire, spiritual longing, and the ways that we as humans can compartmentalize these so often interdependent instincts. Milk Fed is a tender and riotously funny meditation on love, certitude, and the question of what we are all being fed, from one of our major writers on the psyche—both sacred and profane.

TRIGGER WARNING: disordered eating, body dysmorphia, homophobia

This was a wild ride of a novel with an interiority that bordered on too invasive. Following 24 year old Rachel, a woman who has an eating disorder, Milk Fed explores a young woman forging her path and allowing desire to overtake her while still battling the struggles of her past. Rachel is at the beginning of a 90-day communication detox from her mother, the woman largely responsible for Rachel's complex, damaging relationship with food when she meets Miriam, an Orthodox-Jewish woman who relishes a good meal. As Rachel discovers passion and attraction, she also re-engages with eating to savor rather than punish. However, the damage her mother and years of self-loathing have caused does not subside easily. 

Broder's writing feels as if we're reading Rachel's unfiltered, unapologetic thoughts. The novel in no way glorifies disordered eating and I think could be quite triggering for readers who struggle with food and their body image. The descriptions of bodies often relate to food, as if sexual experiences feed Rachel's hunger in ways that food never could. This book is queer, it is erotic, and it will undoubtedly be polarizing. I thought the writing was superb and I would recommend this to readers of Luster by Raven Lelani, Supper Club by Lara Williams, or Want Lynn Steger Strong. 

My only complaint is that the ending felt abrupt.