Milk Fed
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3.0 • 12 Ratings
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
A scathingly funny, wildly erotic and fiercely imaginative story about food, sex and god from the Women's Prize longlisted author of The Pisces
A STYLIST, INDEPENDENT, THE WEEK AND RED HIGHLIGHT FOR 2021
'Sexy and fun and a little weird ... This riot of carnal pleasure will make you laugh as well as gasp' The Times
'A revelation ... Melissa Broder has produced one of the strangest and sexiest novels of the new year ... Exhilarating' Entertainment Weekly
'A luscious, heartbreaking story of self-discovery through the relentless pursuit of desire. I couldn't get enough of this devastating and extremely sexy book' Carmen Maria Machado, author of Her Body and Other Parties
Rachel is twenty-four, a lapsed Jew who has made calorie restriction her religion. By day, she maintains an illusion of control by way of obsessive food rituals. At night, she pedals nowhere on the elliptical machine.
Then Rachel meets Miriam, a young Orthodox Jewish woman 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, Melissa Broder tells a tale of appetites: of physical hunger, of sexual desire, of spiritual longing. 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Broder (The Pisces) delivers a bittersweet and erotic account of a woman's intertwining relationship to food, her mother, and her sexuality. Rachel, a lapsed Jew who works at a Los Angeles talent management agency by day and does stand-up comedy by night, has suffered from anorexia since childhood. But things begin to change after her therapist suggests she take a 90-day communication detox from her overbearing and controlling mother, whose own relationship with eating and fatphobic comments have long contributed to Rachel's body image troubles. After Rachel meets Miriam, a food-loving Orthodox Jewish woman, and embarks on a passionate affair with her, Rachel breaks her self-imposed "Spartan regimen," rediscovers life's simple pleasures, and tries to figure out what will bring her true happiness. With luscious descriptions of delectable foods and fantastical romps through Rachel's imagination, the novel oscillates between serious and playful, obsessive and free, and explores the difficulties of loving oneself in a world that prizes thinness above all else. This poignant exploration of desire, religion, and daughterhood is hard to resist.
Customer Reviews
Too clever
Author
American. BA from Tufts, MFA from City College of New York. Lives in Los Angeles. Has written for The New York Times, Elle.com, VICE, Vogue Italia, and New York Magazine‘s The Cut. Her poems appear in POETRY, The Iowa Review, Guernica, and Fence. She won a Pushcart Prize for poetry. (No. Me either.) She has published five poetry collections, an essay collection called So Sad Today, which is based on her Twitter feed of the same name. Her debut novel, The Pisces (2018), was about a girl who has an affair with a merman.
In brief
Rachel, mid-twenties, lapsed Jewish, lives in LA where she works for a public relations company related to the movie industry, and tries to cope with the long standing eating disorder she developed thanks to her equally food-obsessed mother. She counts calories all day long and times her food intake to minimise the constant hunger, both physical and emotional, that she feels. Her analyst advises her to "detox" from her Mom, i.e. don't communicate with her for 90 days, which sounds impossible and turns out to be. Meanwhile, she falls for Miriam, a fat but happy (zaftig) orthodox Jewish girl who works in a frozen yoghurt shop and tempts her in more ways than one. Self actualisation through dairy products. Discuss.
Writing
Sharp, quintessentially American Jewish humour, layered with LGBT eroticism that all became too much for me after a while. Obviously, I'm not a young Jewish lesbian, so it's possible I missed some of the nuance.
Bottom line
Plenty of funny observations, but my overwhelming impression was of an author saying "look at me, aren't I clever,' over and over again.