Milk Fed

By Melissa Broder

Book Overview

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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1982142502
• ISBN13: 9781982142506
• Release Date: August 2021
• Publisher: Scribner Book Company
• Length: 320 Pages
• Weight: 0.71 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.2" x 7.9"

Customer Reviews

Compelling Until It Isn't

Milk Fed opens with genuine power. Broder's rendering of disordered eating is precise and illuminating: the measuring, the planning, the careful architecture of restriction that governs every corner of her protagonist's life. It is uncomfortable reading in the best possible way. Then she meets her opposite: a woman fully inhabiting her body, eating with pleasure and without apology. The contrast is beautifully drawn, and the slow unraveling of the protagonist's rigid rules carries real narrative tension. Then the novel loses me. What begins as a sharp psychological portrait devolves into a familiar pattern: a thirty-something woman making increasingly erratic choices, burning her life down, and arriving at a tidy resolution that feels unearned. Broder writes with genuine skill, and the first half of this novel is worth reading. But the lessons feel murky by the end, as if the book itself wasn't entirely sure what it wanted to say.