The Audacity of Melissa Broder’s MILK FED

I tend to shy away from new books that get a swell of early praise from mainstream sources, and I’m often vindicated in doing so (American Dirt, anyone?). In the age of gushing blurbs, it’s hard to know what book, if any, can live up to the hype that precedes it.

Color me pleasantly surprised by Milk Fed, Melissa Broder’s second novel (Scribner, February 2021). It received a ton of good press ahead of its publication from big-name magazines. What a breath of fresh air it was for those accolades to be right!

This book has everything: lesbian sex, mommy issues, eating disorders, frozen yogurt, plus-size golems, Jewish mysticism, weirdly specific fantasies about coworkers, a fat chick as the love interest, and a whole lot more. If that feels like a lot, it is… but by the end, we realize that’s kind of the whole point.

Rachel, our narrator, is a deeply unhappy, young Jewish woman living in Los Angeles on the periphery of glitz and glamor. She works for a talent agency and is white-knuckling through some serious personal issues: mainly, recovery from anorexia, which isn’t going as well as she thinks. Every calorie is planned—every meal’s routine, secret and sacred. Everything Rachel does is in service to this brittle little universe she’s built, but one good-sized wind could bring the whole thing crashing down. And what kind of book would this be if everything didn’t come crashing down?

Enter: the glitch in the matrix. Miriam appears behind the counter where Rachel gets her daily, fifty-calorie frozen yogurt. She’s a girl who is everything Rachel fears and craves at once: indulgent, unabashed, and fully realized. She’s a girl whom Rachel unwittingly summoned forth, during an art-therapy exercise, to be her own undoing.

Or did she?

Milk Fed is the kind of book you tear through. Broder’s tale of one girl’s coming of age is at turns funny, poignant, and squirm-in-your-seat sexy. She builds this bold, unconventional narrative by putting us directly under Rachel’s skin. Through Broder’s microscopic lens we can taste the nicotine gum, the grit of the protein bars. We can feel the relief and terror when Rachel finally gives into Miriam’s increasingly dangerous temptations. The boundary between her inner life and reality becomes more permeable as she unravels; think Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, but the fantasies are sexual instead of musical. The border also blurs between Rachel’s life of deprivation and the intoxicating—yet not wholly uncomplicated—fullness that Miriam embodies, to truly thrilling conclusions. And speaking of Miriam: it’s wonderful to see a fat woman as the object of desire in a way that transcends fetishization. Major kudos to Broder for achieving such necessary nuance.

Think of all the fictional characters you’ve loved in your life. Chances are, they have one big thing in common: longing. Yearning. Craving. The fumbling, flawed pursuit of filling a void within themselves. The sense of yearning in Milk Fed vibrates off the page. Rachel is the neediest narrator I’ve ever read. She wants for so much, all at once: control, surrender, comfort, connection to tradition, sex, and a mother who is, well, nothing like her actual mother. She wants to be fed and consumed to the point of oblivion. In the wrong hands, such an emotional black hole of a character might be easy to hate. Hell, you might even put her down and never pick her up again. But Rachel’s voice itself is both relatable and addictive—a combination of Broder’s signature frankness and sardonic wit—and it lets us hover on the edge of that black hole of emotion without falling all the way in.

I was in a writing workshop once, and the instructor pressed us to write something “audacious.” He wanted us to write what scared or embarrassed us, because that’s where the most compelling stories lie. I can only think of a handful of writers today who have the audacity to write like Melissa Broder does, and it’s why I read Milk Fed in a little over a day. No—I devoured it. I kept wandering away from my phone or the TV or my wife so I could crawl back into bed and find out what wild thing Rachel was going to do, say, or fantasize about next. She was audacious in every sense, and I was addicted.

There’s another important void Milk Fed fills in the world of new releases today, and that might be what makes this book so satisfying. So many contemporary novels feel more like long short stories. They’re extended snapshots of situations that are interesting, but go mostly uninterrogated. In the end, we’re left to wonder: what was the point? But Broder pushes her characters past the point of comfort and security. She puts them in hot water time and again; we get to watch them squirm and grow, like real people do.

This kind of character development makes Milk Fed feel wonderfully complete when all is said and done, and not in a contrived, all-tied-up-with-a-bow kind of way. Rachel tells her story from a point of transformation, and there’s hope in that. This moment in her life isn’t just interesting; it’s an inflection point. And that’s the good shit that keeps you coming back for more.

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Kate Gorton

Kate has written 6 articles for us.

13 Comments

    • Yes, definitely! That’s why I made sure to have that mentioned in the review. But as someone who definitely struggled with food for a loooong time, I found it cathartic in the end. I hope folks who are in an OK place give it a try if they are feeling able.

  1. A book about lesbian Jews? I really need to start reading more books cause this sounds right up my alley.

  2. Was hopeful someone would write something thoughtful about this novel – which I loved – and you delivered!

  3. I really really hated this book. I thought the main character was entirely unsympathetic and every other character was one dimensional. I’m an observant Jew–I know what I’m talking about–and there were several errors, small and large, in the portrayal of the Orthodox family. The portrayal of the diet-obsessed materialistic secular mother was ugly to the point of antisemitism, as were some of the fantasies with the Orthodox character. I had hopes for this book, and I honestly cannot overstate how much I thought it was overhyped and painful to read.

  4. I started reading this book and couldn’t remember where it had been recommended to me – but it’s a safe bet it was here! I’m only 29% done and this comment is not about this review, Kate. 💙

    I just wanted to note, beyond a general TW for EDs, that this novel reads specifically like a minute-by-minute eating disorder memoir, detailing everything she puts in her mouth, calories, the works. (Think of Portia de Rossi’s memoir.) When it comes in memoir form, it is a specific type of book that I don’t feel like is beneficial to anyone but, perhaps, the author, who is probably moving through recovery. Like other thinspo, they don’t serve so much as cautionary tales as they do as blueprints.

    In novel form, I’m not sure how I feel about it. Obviously it’s compelling. Anyway other people with ED histories will certainly feel their own ways about it, but I did want to mention this, as if it had been specifically noted I definitely wouldn’t have checked it out from the library.

    Thanks pals!

    • Lol ok I just finished it and while what I said about the first third is definitely true, the second two thirds felt really reparative in a way I’ll be thinking about for awhile!

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