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. 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. 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. 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. 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.
... delectable ... Broder’s second novel combines her singular style with adventures of the calorie- and climax-filled kind, sumptuous fillings surrounded by perfectly baked plot.
With hints of Jami Attenberg’s mishpucha and spiced with Jennifer Weiner’s chutzpah, it is graphic, tender and poetic. Melissa Broder’s approach is perfectly sautéed lesbianism, a rom-com that turns serious ... For those who enjoyed Broder’s The Pisces, much of Milk Fed will be welcome in its familiarity. But this is an even better book that’s enhanced by its Jewishness, its ripeness, its dreams.
In her wildly readable prose, Melissa Broder (So Sad Today) has produced one of the strangest and sexiest novels of the new year: a harrowing, exhilarating, and frankly obscene exploration of all the ways we endeavor to make ourselves disappear — and the untold liberty that comes when our appetites are freed at last.
...hilarious, lush and sorrowful ... Her occasional stand-up routine in Silverlake aside, Rachel is genuinely funny: acerbic, self-deprecating, perceptive ... Broder develops Rachel's voice well beyond the arch mockery of the smarter-than-thou ... One of the novel's less interesting features is the figure Rachel creates out of clay during a session with her therapist ... Though these sections are just as well written and quippy as the rest, they seem like an effort to tie together that which is already beautifully bound: Rachel's hunger, for food and affection, and Miriam's offering ... Broder chooses the perfect structure for Rachel's story: the short, tart, candid chapters are like snacks, and the reader cannot help but reach for another until it is gone.
This book should have come with a napkin ... It’s sexy and fun, but remember this is Melissa Broder, the viscerally honest, troubled author of So Sad Today, an essay collection about addiction, eating disorders and sexual dysfunction. Her popular and dark social media feeds about depression show that this strikingly glamorous woman is no ditzy influencer or peddler of chick-lit. She wears her learning lightly, but Milk Fed continues the tradition of psychoanalytic investigation into the eroticism of mothers, breastfeeding and oral fixation ... Don’t be put off if em>Milk Fed sounds a bit disgusting and weird. It is! But that’s love. That’s the point. Luckily, Broder’s deep delving is leavened by a genuinely hilarious turn of phrase and a wicked satirical eye that will make you laugh out loud more than you gasp in horror. If, like me, you are an accidental connoisseur of sexed-up Jewish Orthodox literature, you’ll know what I mean when I say this is Foreskin’s Lament meets Disobedience. If not, get stuck in and find out. Just don’t forget your napkin.
If there was ever a novel to defy a one-sentence description, Melissa Broder’s new novel would be it. An exploration of hunger centered on a young woman with an eating disorder who finds salvation in the arms of an Orthodox Jewish frozen yogurt scooper, Milk Fed is an even stranger animal than this description might suggest ... With its deadpan tone and self-loathing female narrator attempting to escape her self, the novel may call to mind Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation. But where Moshfegh’s protagonist lives to sleep, Broder’s antiheroine lives to eat. Sweet, rich and fattening foods, from duck sauce to doughnuts, are Rachel’s forbidden fruit ... Milk Fed bravely questions the particularly female lionization of thin and loathing of fat, landing on fresh explanations ... Milk Fed is a celebration of bodily liberation, not a more communal and political version, and the ways we keep ourselves chained to others’ ideas of whom and what we ought to look like and long for.
... dark, sexy, insightful and achingly honest ... For a novel that digs into very real concerns about body image, eating, mental health and a variety of important relationships, Milk Fed has a dreamy quality that swings between fantasy and nightmare. It is lusty and explicit, and full of possibility. Broder does a good job of describing Rachel’s sexual and familial longings and how all of it --- food, mothering, loving --- gets tangled up for her. This is a smart, intense, wonderfully strange and erotic journey of freedom and love --- all kinds of love --- without conditions.
Milk Fed might make you hungry. Milk Fed might make you horny. Milk Fed might make you believe in god, or in love, or at least make you want to try ... pages teeming with mouthwatering descriptions of food ... The more Rachel eats, the more Milk Fed reveals itself as a surprisingly trans book ... compulsively readable ... ends on more than a hopeful note.
As in her terrific first novel, The Pisces (2018), spell-caster Broder guides readers through this seriously tender tale of transformation with seamless humor and staggering smarts: it contains multitudes. An empathic, enrapturing, unputdownable novel of faith, sex, love, and nurture.
... a bittersweet and erotic account of a woman’s intertwining relationship to food, her mother, and her sexuality ... With luscious descriptions of delectable foods and fantastical romps through Rachel’s imagination, the novel oscillates between serious and playful, obsessive and free, and explores the difficulties of loving oneself in a world that prizes thinness above all else. This poignant exploration of desire, religion, and daughterhood is hard to resist.
When it comes to both sex and food, Broder is a formidable writer. She captures all the sticky sweetness, the pleasurable tensions between yearning and satiation. Instead of turning her sharp, acerbic eye on the internal ups and downs of recovery and coming out, however, Broder largely focuses on Rachel's outward expressions of desire. It's nice to think that setting boundaries with pushy family members and hopping into bed with a fat woman could heal Rachel's psyche. Unfortunately, a handful of rejected therapy sessions does not codependency, disordered eating, and internalized homophobia fix, and we don't get to see much, if any, of the internal observations that made The Pisces such a formidable debut. Even so, this novel offers a sad, funny romp about learning to let yourself want what you want, even if it means letting down the people whose acceptance you crave the most. Bold, wry, and delightfully dirty.
