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.
Staff Choice: Matty
Milk Fed was one of my favourite books of the year. It is, at various intervals, sexy, hilarious, disgusting, heartrending, and deeply relatable. Mostly it's about the terrifying power of desire in our lives.
There's all sort of different ideas inside this book, overbearing Jewish mothers, self denial, sex, anorexia, punishment and forgiveness all told through the lens of a women who lives in world of control and denial who then falls in love with a zaftig orthodox Jewish woman who works in a frozen yogurt shop and never denies herself anything.
This is a book about appetites, appetites for food, sex, spirituality, family - the sensual enjoyment of life and how these things can change us, both if we allow ourselves to indulge and if we deny ourselves. I loved it.