She’s a girl who is everything Rachel fears and craves at once: indulgent, unabashed, and fully realized. Miriam appears behind the counter where Rachel gets her daily, fifty-calorie frozen yogurt. And what kind of book would this be if everything didn’t come crashing down?Įnter: the glitch in the matrix. Everything Rachel does is in service to this brittle little universe she’s built, but one good-sized wind could bring the whole thing crashing down. Every calorie is planned-every meal’s routine, secret and sacred. She works for a talent agency and is white-knuckling through some serious personal issues: mainly, recovery from anorexia, which isn’t going as well as she thinks. Rachel, our narrator, is a deeply unhappy, young Jewish woman living in Los Angeles on the periphery of glitz and glamor. If that feels like a lot, it is… but by the end, we realize that’s kind of the whole point. This book has everything: lesbian sex, mommy issues, eating disorders, frozen yogurt, plus-size golems, Jewish mysticism, weirdly specific fantasies about coworkers, a fat chick as the love interest, and a whole lot more. What a breath of fresh air it was for those accolades to be right! It received a ton of good press ahead of its publication from big-name magazines. In the age of gushing blurbs, it’s hard to know what book, if any, can live up to the hype that precedes it.Ĭolor me pleasantly surprised by Milk Fed, Melissa Broder’s second novel (Scribner, February 2021). I tend to shy away from new books that get a swell of early praise from mainstream sources, and I’m often vindicated in doing so ( American Dirt, anyone?). The Autostraddle Encyclopedia of Lesbian Cinema.LGBTQ Television Guide: What To Watch Now.It adds to the profound pleasure of following what could have been a too-familiar trajectory of a lost soul seeking meaning and finding love-because, as she initially grudgingly allows herself to capitulate to her appetites, she isn’t just learning how to love others, in her own way and on her own terms, but to love herself. But Broder’s goes deeper than allegory-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, whether or not they seem recognizable to us. In another writer’s hands, the two women and their relationship might have presented as little more than a literary device to lead us to Rachel’s awakening, and that certainly could have been effective. Broder has a rare ability to ground her fantasy in reality without undermining her her imaginative vision, making it feel personal and raw and relatable. Broder can make even a cranky secular-Jewish queer reader like me, who typically chafes at magical realism and wet-blankets flights of fancy, eagerly suspend disbelief.
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