Milk Fed (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9781982142490)

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 Weekly and 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.

Author: Melissa Broder
ISBN-10: 1982142499
ISBN-13: 9781982142490
Publisher: Scribner Book Company
Language: English
Published: 02/02/2021
Pages: 304
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 0.85lbs
Size: 8.50h x 5.50w x 1.20d

Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 10/19/2020
Library Journal Prepub Alert 09/01/2020 pg. 43
Kirkus Reviews 12/01/2020
Booklist 12/01/2020 pg. 24
Shelf Awareness 02/16/2021