Milk Fed: A Novel

Product Description
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).\nRachel 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.\nRachel 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.\n“A ruthless, laugh-out-loud examination of life under the tyranny of diet culture” (
Glamour) 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).
Review
"An erotic, singular experience that could only come from Broder's mind... brimming with tension, and food, and fantasies."
—Isaac Fitzgerald, "The Today Show"\n“Hilarious, lush and sorrowful…the short, tart, candid chapters are like snacks, and the reader cannot help but reach for another until it is gone…This work is unafraid of vulnerability, and appetite, and loss.”\n—Jackie Thomas-Kennedy, The Minneapolis Star Tribune\n“Captivating…delicious and depraved…a ruthless, laugh-out-loud examination of life under the tyranny of diet culture... You will eat this up, run to buy a copy for a friend, and realize with a sigh that every one of your friends needs this book in her life.” \n—Glamour\n"A delectable exploration of physical and emotional hunger... combines Broder's singular style with adventures of the calorie- and climax-filled kind, sumptuous fillings surrounded by perfectly baked plot."
—Bethanne Patrick, The Washington Post\n“Profoundly sexy yet deeply sad…
Milk Fed gathers strands of faith, hunger, queerness, lust, and loneliness and braids them into a fully risen challah of human experience.”\n—Emma Specter, Vogue \n“Outstanding . . . a bold and luscious story of desire in all its forms—for food, for sex, for belonging. . . . Rarely has the fraught intersection of pleasure, appetite, and diet culture been written about so deliciously as in
Milk Fed.”
—Esquire\n"Anything by Melissa Broder is an immediate must-read... a precise blend of desire, discomfort, spirituality, and existential ache makes Broder’s depiction of the human experience so canny.\n—Arianna Rebolini, Buzzfeed\n“A thrilling examination of hunger, desire, faith, family and love.”\n—Time Magazine\n“Bravely questions the particularly female lionization of thin and loathing of fat, landing on fresh explanations…deliciously droll… a celebration of bodily liberation.”\n—The New York Times\n“Dangerously delicious and utterly idiosyncratic,
Milk Fed is the honest, compelling convergence of diet culture, religion, and sex that we've been craving.”\n—
Marie Claire \n"Clever, thoughtful, and erotic."\n—Bust \n“A Freudian fable of sorts, one that is hilarious, self-deprecating and full of Broder's signature profligate brilliance. This visceral and transporting portrait of self-denial and its twin, excess, sheds light on the psychology underpinning the American obsession with weight. Daring, chaotic and pleasingly heretical,
Milk Fed is the work of a total pro.