3.5
Milk Fed
ByPublisher 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.
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.
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesMilk Fed Reviews
3.5
“From the reviews I’ve seen; you either hate or love this book, so I was pretty curious to see where I would land.
I can 100% see why some people hate it, find it super boring or way too uncomfortable to read, but I personnally really loved my experience with it.
Yes indeed she mostly just eats and talks about sex and her mommy issues and how sad girl she is but i felt like it was so much more than that and i ate it all up. It sometimes made me deeply uncomfortable and was unsettling but I couldn’t pry my eyes away and I loved to be in this fucked up woman’s head, who really was just a woman in pain whose entire world is defined by the first relationship who failed her, her own mother. I can’t even explain why, it was just so weird and compelling and heartbreaking.
I loved the food descriptions, the body image issues, the obsessing, the loss of control, the complicated and deeply problematic mother-daughter dynamics, the self-esteem issues and how it translated in her relationships, sex life and vision of intimacy. It was all so vivid and the words she put to the feelings were beautiful. As a sex therapist myself, this psychological process and the consequences of her trauma were very interesting to witness.
In the last few chapters, I felt a lump in my throat, a nostalgia, a feeling of heartbreak and bittersweetness and it kind of took me by surprise, but I ended up connecting with this story a lot more than I thought I would. Even though Rachel is mostly unlikable and makes weird ass questionnable decisions the whole time, my heart couldn’t help breaking for her and how love hungry she was. It definitly made me feel something and just for that it was really worth the read.”
“This had such a promising and interesting start and then fell completely flat for me. 3 stars are for the beginning of it tbh. (Check TW, there’s a lot of talk about ED)”
About Melissa Broder
Melissa Broder is the author of the novels Milk Fed, The Pisces, and Death Valley, the essay collection So Sad Today, and five poetry collections, including Superdoom. She has written for The New York Times, Elle, and New York magazine’s The Cut. She lives in Los Angeles. Follow her on Twitter @SoSadToday and @MelissaBroder and Instagram @RealMelissaBroder.
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