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The tension of this unease pins Rachel to adversarial habits: “But my rituals kept me skinny, and if happiness could be relegated to one thing alone, skinniness, then one might say I was, in a way, happy.” Only Rachel isn’t. ‘Do you want to be a chubby or do you want boys to like you?’ she’d say.” This sets up inequitable dichotomies that torture Rachel, causing her to bully her body into an uneasy structure, both inside and out.
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Her mother is the seed of this self-loathing: “When I got back from New York, my mother would ask for a full report of all I had eaten. Broder exposes us to a new truth about ourselves, what we demand, what we cannot contain, and what we must examine in order to live our best and most human lives.Ī twentysomething assistant at a talent agency whose total cumulative goal in the beginning of the novel is to count calories between flourishes of repressed bisexual lust, Rachel embodies control and demand. Milk Fed also continues to flex Broder’s poetic muscles, honed while writing her four previous poetry collections, as well as the unique conversational/analytical presence she brought to her personal essay collection So Sad Today.Īnd while all of these previous books form an aesthetic Broder grooms, a stylistic and thematic common tongue, Milk Fed is a unique beast inside of those connective tissues, prowling through religion unlike she’s ever done before, gutting and reconfiguring femininity from a fresh perspective, and pressing readers into an animalistic romance with food as emotional consumption, as sexual bravery, and as genuine love. This debut showcased some of the same scope that continues in her sophomore novel, including unabashed sexual scenes, graceful mixtures of bodily and emotional want, and a keen existential resonance. Milk Fed follows Broder’s pungent and seaward first novel The Pisces, an erotic love story between a woman and a merman. This is the beauty of Melissa Broder’s latest novel, the way in which Milk Fed slips between extremes, mounting a fanatical, romantic ploy within and without the body. Yet the novel also gave me bouts of body consciousness, acute awareness of caloric meaning, thoughts about the importance of the expectations we place on our physiques, and glimpses into the ways desire can masquerade as comfort while portending otherwise. Milk Fed made me want to ingest a mountain of delicious, sugary, fatty foods-donuts, chips, pizza, candy-then sprint into the arms of some lusty entanglement. Tyler, who also essays about Broder’s Milk Fed. We’re happy to share this conversation between Melissa Broder and J. In our hybrid interview series, we pair an author Q&A with a critical essay about one or more of their books.