Feb 27

Feb 27 Milk Fed

Author: Melissa Broder
Publisher: Scribner
Goodreads | The StoryGraph

Click above to buy this book from my Bookshop.org shop, which supports independent bookstores (not Amazon). You can also find it via your favorite indie bookstore here.

Note: Content and trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.

Cover Description

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.

TL;DR Review

Milk Fed is a visceral, bodily, sharply written novel about disordered eating, sexual hunger, spirituality, and the balance between freedom and control.

For you if: You’re interested in stories that explore different types of desire (and can handle intense descriptions of disordered eating and sexual content).

Full Review

Milk Fed has been making the rounds in the weeks since it was published, and I can see why. This book is ~a lot~, but Melissa Broder is one of those talented writers who seems to have x-ray vision into the deepest parts of people, and a unique skill in bringing those things out with words.

Rachel’s life is defined by her eating disorder and body dysmorphia. But she’s hungry in more ways than one — she’s also got an intense and free sexual appetite, and her perspectives on food, freedom, and desire twist and turn around each other. Then she meets Miriam, a closeted Orthodox Jewish woman whose family and affection centers food — essentially, the reverse of Rachel’s cage and freedom. And Rachel’s sense of self begins to slowly, but not comfortably, change.

A word of warning: If you have food-related triggers or sensitivity to these topics, tread carefully or skip this one — Rachel talks about her disordered eating habits in detail and with reverence. The sexual content is also explicit and very descriptive. But as you can imagine, for those who are prepared for that kind of content, the two entwine to create the kind of writing that really, really does something beyond words.

I have not read Broder’s first novel, and I hear that one is even more intense. I’m not sure that one will be for me, but can see, here, exactly why and how she makes an impact.