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"A novel about eating disorders, their corrosive effects on everything from how you spend your time to who you choose to love (or lust), and the freedom that comes when you let your appetite roam where it wants. Rachel is a twentysomething plagued by the fear of weight gain instilled in her from an early age by her anxious and fatphobic mother. When her therapist challenges her to cut off contact with her mom for 90 days and stop restricting everything else, Rachel's carefully constructed shell of calories in calories out begins to crack. In Milk Fed, we have change, we have desire, we have mental illness, we have prejudice, and we have liberation. Let the milk and honey flow!"
— Molly M.
"
How do you follow up the sheer absurdity of a novel like THE PISCES? Melissa Broder's response: with a very queer, very Jewish fable of physical and spiritual delights.
MILK FED follows Rachel, a calorie-counting, image obsessed twenty-something working in the Hollywood fame machine. She lives by a strict ascetic code (nicotine gum for breakfast; a protein bar for lunch; and plain yogurt for dinner). A slim waist and approval from an emotionally withholding mommy drive her. By all appearances, she is cultivating an Instagram-worthy product for all to envy and desire. That is, until Miriam--the curvy, daring, eccentric Miriam--appears on the scene to blow it all to pieces, revealing to Rachel the varieties of desire and satisfaction.
What ensues is something that reads like a fabulist sexual awakening--one that prominently features the golem of Jewish lore, all-night food binges, and sage rabbinical advice. If the Coen Brothers knew anything about what its like to be a millennial women, they might write something like this. But I thank little-g god every day for divining unto this earth Melissa Broder and the wise, funny, purifying gift that is MILK FED."
— Uriel P.
February 2021 Indie Next List
“Titillating and hilarious, this book is Broder’s crowning achievement (so far). Calorie-obsessed Rachel is an unlikely but irresistible heroine, and when she meets Miriam at the yogurt shop, sparks (and sprinkles!) fly. Each must reckon with her Jewish identity as well as her heart’s deepest, lushest desires, while the intense scrutiny of the mother figure looms large. This story is unflinchingly honest, unexpectedly moving, and a brilliant checkmate to shame, both carnal and spiritual. I couldn’t put it down.”
— Kristen Iskandrian, Thank You Books, Birmingham, AL
Description
Named a Best Book of the Year by Entertainment Weekly,Vogue,Time,Esquire,BookPage, and more
A Most-Anticipated Selection by Vogue * Refinery29 * Vulture * BuzzFeed * Harper’s Bazaar * O, The Oprah Magazine * The Millions * Literary Hub * The Rumpus * Publishers Weeklyand more
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.
About the Author
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 TheNew 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.
Praise For…
"An erotic, singular experience that could only come from Broder's mind... brimming with tension, and food, and fantasies." —Isaac Fitzgerald, "The Today Show"
“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.” —Jackie Thomas-Kennedy, The Minneapolis Star Tribune
“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.” —Glamour
"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
“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.” —Emma Specter, Vogue
"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. —Arianna Rebolini, Buzzfeed
“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
“A thrilling examination of hunger, desire, faith, family and love.” —Time Magazine
“Bravely questions the particularly female lionization of thin and loathing of fat, landing on fresh explanations…deliciously droll… a celebration of bodily liberation.” —The New York Times
“Dangerously delicious and utterly idiosyncratic, Milk Fed is the honest, compelling convergence of diet culture, religion, and sex that we've been craving.” —Marie Claire
"Clever, thoughtful, and erotic." —Bust
“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.” —Emma Levy, Shelf Awareness
“If you’re going to read one book this February, make it this one… Milk Fed is brutally funny, poetic, and at times, totally bizarre…Broder writes with the kind of unfiltered honesty that lives deep inside of us” —Gina Vaynshteyn, Apartment Therapy
"A delicious new novel that ravishes with sex and food... Broder has a rare ability to ground her fantasy in reality without undermining her imaginative vision, making it feel personal and raw and relatable... with humanity, sardonic wit, and erotic scenes so potent that the heat of my blushing face made my NYC-apartment radiator’s seem tepid, Milk-Fed vividly evokes the lives of each woman, so that we’re fully invested in them." —Kera Bolonik, Boston Globe
"A romp... a pageant of bodily juices and exploratory fingers and moan after moan of delight... [from] a wild, wicked mind." —Hillary Kelly, The Los Angeles Times
"Explores hunger in all its permutations through the eyes of Rachel, who begins a romance with a woman who works at the frozen yogurt shop she frequents. As their relationship deepens, so does Rachel’s capacity for nourishment and pleasure, bodily and spiritually." —The New York Times
“A revelation...Melissa Broder has produced one of the strangest and sexiest novels of the new year...exhilarating.” —Leah Greenblatt, Entertainment Weekly
“Deeply hilarious and embarrassingly relatable.” —Samantha Irby, author of Wow, No Thank You
"Milk Fed hits that sweet spot where pleasure and tension intersect, where the sumptuous exploration of sexuality and spirit meets the rigidities of culture and society. Strange and surreal, Broder's writing is a marvel of wit, heart, and thoughtful curiosity about the body and mind and how these things can overflow their boundaries to become utterly new." —Alexandra Kleeman, author of You Too Could Have a Body Like Mine
“Milk Fed is a novel of appetites; a luscious, heartbreaking story of self-discovery through the relentless pursuit of desire. I couldn’t get enough of this devastating and extremely sexy book.” —Carmen Maria Machado,author ofIn the Dream House
"Broder's funny, semi-sweet writing will leave you ravenous for more." —The Week
"Only Melissa Broder could dig into our obsessions, the ways our parents have ruined us, and blossoming queer love with such a bold panache." —Lit Hub
"Few writers so innately understand or better capture the endless, palpable hunger that so many people carry around with them, day after day. This hunger is for food, for sex, for love, for compassion, for understanding, and it is this kind of ravenous appetite that Broder explores in her exultant new novel... riotously funny and perfectly profane." —Refinery 29
"A dizzily compelling story of love, lust, addiction, faith, maternal longing, and...frozen yogurt... Broder’s sex writing is, as always, first-rate, but perhaps even more striking is her ability to lay bare the frantic interior calculus of disordered eating alongside the hypnotic pull of spirituality." —Vogue
"A sensuous and delightfully delirious tale... Filled with an unadulterated filthiness that would make Philip Roth blush, Broder's latest is a devour-it-in-one-sitting wonder.” —O, The Oprah Magazine
"Bold, wry, and delightfully dirty... Broder is a formidable writer. She captures all the sticky sweetness, the pleasurable tensions between yearning and satiation... a sad, funny romp about learning to let yourself want what you want." —Kirkus
"Spell-caster Broder guides readers through this seriously tender tale of transformation with seamless humor and staggering smarts: it contains multitudes. An empathic, enrapturing, unputdownable novel of faith, sex, love, and nurture." —Booklist, starred review
"With luscious descriptions of delectable foods and fantastical romps through imagination, Milk Fed oscillates between serious and playful, obsessive and free, and explores the difficulties of loving oneself in a world that prizes thinness above all else. This poignant exploration of desire, religion, and daughterhood is hard to resist.” —Publishers Weekly
“Sin as self-discovery, appetite as insight, transgression as transformation, Milk Fed is at once hilarious and heartbreaking; watching Broder's characters try to love themselves might just make you love yourself.... or at least hate yourself a little less." —Shalom Auslander, author ofMother for Dinner
"Smart, funny, sexy, and hard to put down. In this fast-moving, deeply compelling novel, Melissa Broder combines an unexpected (and very hot) love story with a sharp-edged examination of body image, religion, and cultural identity." —Tom Perrotta, author of Mrs. Fletcher
“Titillating and hilarious, this book is Broder’s crowning achievement (so far). Calorie-obsessed Rachel is an unlikely but irresistible heroine, and when she meets Miriam at the yogurt shop, sparks (and sprinkles!) fly. Each must reckon with her Jewish identity as well as her heart’s deepest, lushest desires, while the intense scrutiny of the mother figure looms large. This story is unflinchingly honest, unexpectedly moving, and a brilliant checkmate to shame, both carnal and spiritual. I couldn’t put it down.”