The Saturday Paper

Books: Melissa Broder’s Milk Fed. Bri Lee Gary Lonesborou­gh’s The Boy from the Mish. Timmah Ball

Milk Fed

- •Bri Lee

Bloomsbury, 304pp, $29.99

Rachel is a 20-something, non-practising Jewish woman working for a talent agency where most of the people around her suck. She’s weird and funny, occasional­ly doing stand-up routines full of black humour, but she doesn’t have any real friends. Her life is ruled by her obsession with controllin­g every calorie – in versus out.

Growing up, Rachel’s domineerin­g mother was “the high priestess of food”, and as an adult her mother maintains this hold, via texts and phone calls. Rachel describes beautiful early childhood experience­s with her Jewish grandparen­ts, driving around New York eating at “all the old culinary haunts of our tribe”. Rachel would return home with a full heart and a fuller belly, only to be informed by her mother that nobody would love her if she stayed chubby.

Broder’s use of religious language to talk about food isn’t totally original, but it definitely works. Rachel has eating “rituals”, she “abstains”, and when she’s been “good” about all this behaviour, Rachel says, “I felt high on my sacrifice”. Fittingly, the novel is full of truly fantastic food writing. Nobody is as closely observant of food – its textures and colours and flavours and presentati­ons – as a person who is obsessed with it. In Broder’s hands, frozen yoghurt really is elevated to a spiritual experience. Burritos are “warm babies swaddled up tight in blankets”.

The drive of the novel is Rachel’s growing affection for Miriam, the young woman she meets at the frozen yoghurt place near her work. Rachel describes Miriam’s body as “opulently corpulent”. Miriam comes from an Orthodox Jewish family, and the middle section of the book is a sweet time of their burgeoning companions­hip while, of course, Rachel wants more. Their first proper hangout, over dinner, is divine foreplay. Miriam is unselfcons­cious about her body and sees God in the abundance around them. Rachel starts eating again.

It is 2021 and readers are right to be suspicious of the oft-rehashed plotline in which a woman learns to love herself by someone else loving her fully. What saves Milk Fed from cliché is how damn sexy and freaky it is. Those who loved Broder’s first novel, The Pisces, will be delighted by Milk Fed.

The title alludes to a taboo that Rachel knowingly skirts. She always felt starved by her mother – of both love and food – and now when she masturbate­s it is often a very motherly woman who gives or takes pleasure. Craving romantic and maternal love, she sometimes seeks these two feelings from the same person. Rachel’s gradual transforma­tion is both internal and external, and properly satisfying, as are most of the sex scenes. Enjoy!

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