Milk Fed

I do my own sort of doom-scrolling probably about once a day and while I'm scanning the headlines for (mostly bad) news, I often come across literary reviews and articles with book recommendations. Milk Fed by Melissa Broder came up on several of those lists in the spring and early summer. I requested it from the library and it became available shortly after I got home from vacation. Judging from the blurb on goodreads, it didn't sound like a perfect fit for me, but I was intrigued. 

Here's the blurb:

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.

 

There were parts of the book that I found interesting (like when discussing the Palestinian issue with Miriam's family). There were other parts where I wanted to scream to Miriam and tell her what to do - or what to not do. Many issues were resolved within the novel but with no explanation at all of how they were resolved. That's what I found most lacking.

It was a quick easy read. I enjoyed Broder's writing style. 

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