Milk Fed by Melissa Broder
[Content Warning: disordered eating]
Milk Fed (2021) is a wildly erotic, bitingly witty and outlandish novel about food, sex and religion from Melissa Broder, acclaimed author of The Pisces. It’s an imaginative tale of extremes built on the interconnected appetites that fuel the human experience: physical hunger, sexual desire and spiritual longing, wrapped up in one delicious book.
Milk Fed follows the everyday life of Rachel, a 24-year-old lapsed Jew who has made calorie restriction her religion. Stemming from deeply rooted mother issues – that manifest both in an eating disorder and an obsessive fascination with the roles of mother and daughter – Rachel faces every day with the illusion of control: how much she eats, how many calories she burns, how she is perceived by others.
It isn’t until she meets Miriam, an Orthodox Jew and avid over-indulger, that she begins to let her carefully constructed views of the world shift. And while Miriam and her family take to nurturing Rachel – feeding her, indulging her, and even welcoming her into religious family events – her obsession simply and seamlessly shifts from one thing to the next: from starving to over-eating, from calorie restriction to Miriam. As the two grow closer and closer, we get a nuanced yet disturbing insight into how personal traumas and constraints can manifest both in someone’s view of themselves, and their view of the world.
And yet, Rachel isn’t stupid. She is very much aware of her situation: her relationship with her mother, with Miriam, with herself. There is no wilful ignorance – which is exactly what pushes her escapades into wild territory. Whether it’s giving in to sexual fantasies involving mother figures, scraping the top off frozen yogurt sundaes hunched over a bin in the middle of the street, or going on food binges that go exactly until midnight – these instances demonstrate her control, and not her powerlessness. She herself posits quite early on:
“Was it real freedom? Unlikely. But my rituals kept me skinny, and if happiness could be relegated to one thing alone, skinniness, then one might say I was, in a way, happy.”
The book touches on many significant topics, such as religion, eating disorders, sexual desire and trauma – and yet, in Rachel, Broder creates the perfect vessel for absorbing and observing it all in witty yet equally nuanced ways. Revelations aren’t forced, they are real: unabashedly honest, and often vulnerable. Speaking of Miriam, Rachel says:
“Was she going to abandon me, leave me stranded in my body? I'd be in exile with a stomach that demanded more of everything.”
Of her mother-figure colleague, Ana, she says:
“My mother persuaded me to stay thin by insulting me. Ana did it by insulting everyone but me. This absence of rejection felt like an embrace.”
However, the main course in this book is Broder’s delicious and fascinating, if at times grotesque and revolting, writing. You feel what Rachel feels, about food, about Miriam, about sex – you taste the bulging meals described, you feel the loss of control, you can’t help but ache for the caresses she desires. And it’s all thanks to the writing – it embraces and holds up everything Rachel goes through, so that even when it becomes profane, we can’t help but eat it right up. Just like Rachel:
“I was consumed by the yogurt, all five senses bathing in its drips and swirls, as though I had entered some yogurt door, no thought, no vision or sound but the yogurt and its sprinkles, any fear or hesitation fully eclipsed by sensation, the crunch, the slurp, the melt, the heavenly feeling of cleaning each side evenly with my tongue – hardness and softness, sweetness and more sweetness – a prism of beauty on Earth and above it, and me, the me on the ground, nothing but a giant mouth and tongue, eating and eating for nothing, not one thing, except sheer pleasure alone.”
Milk Fed is a tale of appetites, there are no questions about that – and while Rachel’s observations ring true even despite her obsessions, this isn’t a book for everyone. Its protagonist isn’t perfect, and this isn’t a tale with a happy ending. Its interconnected themes provide a lot of food for thought, but Broder doesn’t hold back in presenting these completely through Rachel’s eyes: with a side of unabashed desire, even when it isn’t pretty.
Told with incredible nuance – both compulsive and repulsive – Milk Fed feeds into our desire to seek out the extremes, so that even when a line spills out at the edges, we are compelled to read on. And I implore you to do so!
Fruzsina Gál is an aspiring writer, born in Hungary but living in Australia. She has been a reader all her life, and her first short story, 'The Turul' was published in Griffith University's 2018 anthology, Talent Implied. Her writing is often focussed on identity and the effects of immigration on the self. You can find her online at www.fruzsinagal.com or @thenovelconversation.