Milk Fed
A Novel
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3.6 • 25 Ratings
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
Named a Best Book of the Year by Entertainment Weekly, Vogue, Time, Esquire, BookPage, and more
This darkly hilarious and “delicious new novel that ravishes with sex and food” (The Boston Globe) from the acclaimed author of The Pisces and So Sad Today is a “precise blend of desire, discomfort, spirituality, and existential ache” (BuzzFeed).
Rachel is twenty-four, a lapsed Jew who has made calorie restriction her religion. By day, she maintains an illusion of existential control, through 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.
Rachel soon 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.
“A ruthless, laugh-out-loud examination of life under the tyranny of diet culture” (Glamour), this novel blends humor and dark comedy with sharp insights into contemporary relationships. Broder tells a tale of appetites: physical hunger, sexual desire, spiritual longing, and the ways that we compartmentalize these so often interdependent instincts. Milk Fed is “riotously funny and perfectly profane” (Refinery 29) from “a wild, wicked mind” (Los Angeles Times). Fans of coming-of-age fiction and literary fiction alike will find this novel filled with emotional depth and wit.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Melissa Broder’s new novel is funny, irreverent, and very, very raunchy. Its heroine is Rachel, a young woman who works as an assistant to an obnoxious L.A. talent manager and spends most of her time obsessing over her minuscule calorie intake and lamenting her unhappy relationship with her critical and withholding Jewish mother. When Rachel meets Miriam—a zaftig Orthodox woman who works at Rachel’s preferred frozen-yogurt place and takes great pleasure in coaxing her skinny customer to eat over-the-top sundaes—her regimented existence goes skidding off the rails. Broder, whose previous books include the essay collection So Sad Today and her debut novel, The Pisces, is a writer who delights in shattering taboos. Her joy in the ridiculous and obscene are infectious, making Milk Fed a good-time read.
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.
