Some may think this is great, but it’s not for me. Having a hard time concentrating on reading and finding a book that I can get in to right now, sorry.

Thanks for the opportunity

CW: Disordered eating, mentions of bulimia/bingeing

In 2017, I read Melissa Broder's first novel, 'The Pisces'. Plenty of reviews detested it, calling it pretentious, gross and weird, among other things. I'm almost certain the same epithets will be delivered to her second novel - this book is not going to be for everyone. But, a lot like 'The Pisces', I found myself oddly enjoying 'Milk Fed' - so much so that I read it incredibly quickly.

Marketed as a novel about food, god and sex, Milk Fed follows Rachel, a young Jewish woman with a terrible relationship with food and her body. She restricts herself to an insane amount, plans her days around the things she'll eat, carefully controlling her routine and her life. Until she meets an Orthodox woman named Miriam, who coaxes her out of her calorie-controlled shell and allows her to breathe.

I liked this book. The graphic sex scenes are a lot. In fact, I often found myself sort of skimming those because they felt graphic for graphic's sake, rather than giving anything interesting to the story. It was a little difficult to read the parts about disordered eating, but the great paragraphs of description about the joys of food made up for it. I can't quite describe how I liked this book or why, I just sort of did. The pacing is good, the story moves well.

My one major disappointment was the ending. It just sort of finished with no pay-off. It almost felt disjointed from the rest of the story, like it had been tacked on quickly because the author didn't know how to finish her novel. I suspect I wanted a slightly more conclusive ending, but Broder's point was almost certainly to make the ending uncertain.

Rachel has grown up starving herself to please her mother. She hates herself and has never had her mother's love. All of the meager portions she eats are measured out and are all Rachel believes she deserves. Until she meets Miriam.
Miriam introduces plenty. Miriam is sensual and fat while Rachel is thin and miserable. Miriam draws Rachel in to her world and the two women fall for each other.
I felt uncomfortable with both the depictions of Rachel starving herself and the gluttony that Miriam enjoys. Neither position seemed healthy or sustainable.

"Who is that 'out of control' woman you are so afraid of becoming? What does she look like?"

Funny, sexy, perverted, and extremely fun to read! I was reminded of Ottessa Moshfegh (whose narrators are arguably much darker, and riskier). But this was still a cathartically enjoyable read, and very funny. Themes include appetite (both food and sexual), mothers, perfection, why L.A. culture sucks, and what "self-care" really means. I also liked the golem thread of the plot. I could have used fewer dream sequences, and tbh I found the mother plot a bit too typical. MAJOR triggers in here for people with disordered eating, though it definitely contains a very therapeutic/healing message... I'm pretty convinced the author has read Marion Woodman.

Thanks to the publishers and Netgalley for the ARC.

"Life was a lot less bleak when you were staring straight down the barrel of a burrito. Was this how some people lived all the time?"

"It was like being asphyxiated by a part of my own self - the need for approval and validation I so despised. More of me? That was the last thing I wanted!"

"Did anyone genuinely like anything? Most art was bad. I preferred the work of dead people. At least the dead weren't on Twitter."

"I thought about how I wanted to take a knife and cut myself out of me."

I’ve followed Broder’s work for a while and was excited when I saw she had a new novel out after The Pisces.

Her writing style is easy to pick out - insightful but simple, with a sense of humour that oscillates between dark and vulgar. In Milk Fed, she focuses on Rachel, a 24 year old Jewish woman in LA whose sole focus is calorie counting and staying thin to please her mother. She meets Esther, who briefly takes the form of a Golem - taunting her sexually and drawing her away from her diet religion.

I really enjoyed the book, but it did get a bit repetitive after a while and I felt like there wasn’t much of a resolution. Despite that, I would definitely recommend it to anyone who’s ever enjoyed Broder’s style.

A marmite book, I guess?

Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for an advanced copy!

A book about self esteem, lust, food and family. A clever and funny novel with some very hard hitting subjects. I loved the combination of food, sexuality and upbringing. This book is sexy, the characters rich with personality and the settings realistic. This is a very visual story- perfectly descriptive
There are a lot of difficult subjects in the book that could be triggering to some

Off the bat, I'll give a content warning for eating disorders.

In this book, we are deep in the POV of Rachel, a Jewish part time comedian with an eating disorder that therapy doesn't seem to be touching. So much is explored here and I think all of it is done in an effective way. The sex scenes verge on the gross at times, but it all feels very honest. The writing is sharp but intelligent. I like how in her exploration of another woman's body, Rachel seems to gain some acceptance of her own and gets some relief from her ED. I'll be sure to pick up The Pisces at some point.

I tried to read this one slowly, but I think it's impossible not to get sucked in - I managed to spread it out over 2 days and ended up staying up late to finish it. It's that good.

The main character Rachel's complicated relationship with food is intertwined with her equally complicated relationship with her mother, Judaism, her sexuality, and desire. Milk Fed is messy and raw and wonderful - the writing flows so well whilst remaining nuanced, insightful and complex. I loved the musings on God, and the hallucinations with the golem and the Rabbi.
I loved the secondary characters in the story: Miriam, an Orthodox Jewish woman who works at Rachel's favourite fro-yo shop, Ana, the co-worker that Rachel wants to mother her, and Ofer, the overly PC self proclaimed super feminist boss.

I hadn't heard of Melissa Broder before reading this, but now I'm going to try and find everything else she's written.

Oh my goooooooood you are making me so uncomfortable (flame eyes emoji) I LOVE IT!!

A scathingly funny, wildly erotic, and fiercely imaginative story about food, sex, and god.

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 definitely needs to be a lot of content warnings for this book! The main character has an eating disorder and details of calorie counting and other methods for calorie restriction are absolutely rife which many people may find super triggering. It’s quite clear in this blurb that this is a theme of the book but it was even more explicit than I expected. And of course with this, a LOT of fat phobia.

Speaking of explicit, there is a lot of very detailed sex and sex fantasies here.

I wasn’t sure if I liked this book, but I found it so so so compelling. I literally started it and read a third of it in one sitting without moving. I ending up reading 3/4 of it in one evening and finished it the next day. So I was definitely engrossed!

I don’t want to give too much away, but Milk Fed is the story of Rachel, work works in LA for a talent agency and suffers from anorexia. She also has a terrible relationship with her mother, so her therapist assigns her a 90 day detox from contact with her mother.

From the blurb I expected more about the mother-daughter relationship, but it’s definitely more about Rachel, her relationship with food and her interest in a woman called Miriam who works at a frozen yoghurt shop Rachel frequents.

Did I like it? I’m not sure. I definitely couldn’t put it down and I found everything very believable and realistic and the relationships very real, particularly between the main character and her mother.

I feel like I wanted a bit more. The character development is good but you see it coming as the book progresses, but I did like the themes of gender, sexuality, expectations on women and religion. Miriam and Rachel are both Jewish and I found their different approaches to this interesting.

This is a book I’m really interested to read the discourse about as I’m not sure what I think.

3.5 stars

I loved The Pisces but I think I love Milk Fed even more. I thought it was a very sensitive approach to eating disorders and self esteem. I felt completely absorbed in Rachel’s story and her journey towards accepting herself.

Rachel is a lapsed Jew who lives through calorie restriction; that was until her therapist recommended a 90 day detox from her mother, where these restrictions begun. Meeting Miriam, who works at her frozen yogurt shop, changes everything.

It's a story about "food, sex and god" and, tbh, yes that captures it really. There was something addictive from the start and it was a fine, and very easy to inhale, read. Melissa Broder's writing is whip smart, and she draws complex and women so brilliantly.

Melissa Broder writes some strange novels. The Pisces is about a woman with low self esteem who takes up with a merman and this one keeps up the standard with a similar heroine but, in this instance, she finds love with a woman and food! Rachel, the heroine in question, has a serious eating disorder brought on by an unpleasant mother and a distant father which has come to rule her life.

The first chapter of the book is about what she eats day by day and minute by minute. It’s a monument to obsessive calorie control, assisted by eating far too much sweetener but, predictably, when her control is lost she binges uncontrollably. It’s a good description of an eating disorder and its capacity to rule one’s life.

What quickly becomes clear is the link between her controlling diet, her perceptions of herself and her relationships with others so that it is logical that she becomes friendly with a girl from a yoghurt bar. The book traces the slow expansion of their relationship and the way that Rachel, literally, eats her way into it. The woman she meets there, Miriam, is controlled in a different way by her orthodox Jewish religion and its expectations and she slowly cast off these controls as Rachel abandons her diet.

Without being coy about it, Miriam is marginally obese but her plump, expansive frame is a heavenly counterpoint to Rachel’s starved body. She eats plenty to maintain it as well. In fact, food is everywhere in the novel. The film adaptation will be a monument to product placement because everything is branded, instant and understood in terms of its calories and, frequently, its sweetness.

It’s no wonder Rachel needs these compensations from what we read about her past, the stripping away of her self-confidence and her tentative steps to discover herself as a lesbian. It makes her a difficult friend and, having been invited to Miriam’s house and taken to the bosom of her overly loving and embracing family, she messes up big time. She messes up at work as well. In fact, life generally is a struggle.

Somehow, this unlikely book works. The sumptuousness of the food, the over enclosing nature of Miriam’s family, the emergent relationship and Rachel’s constant hatred and rejection of herself and her body are wrapped together in an unlikely package which carries the reader along. Some critics describe the book as erotic and there is something slightly strange in the way that everything is oral so that the eating overlaps with the sex. As to whether you find it erotic, well that’s up to you, but it might make you think twice as you tuck into your dinner!

Milk Fed is not for the faint hearted. It is raw, explicit and dives into complex relationships between the body, food, mothers and daughters. This novel will divide opinion, but I enjoyed how Melissa Broder doesn't shy away from the grittiness of life, desires and queer relationships.

Broder's previous book 'The Pisces' could be classed under Venice Beach Merman Erotica, this book is LA Eating Disorder Jewish Lesbian Erotica. If that is your bag then you are in luck!
I enjoyed 'The Pisces', it was a joyous, daft romp that had some hilarious comments on dating and personal grooming. 'Milk Fed' is just on the wrong side of angst for me, I needed a bit more joy and a little less body dysmorphia. I did not warm to Rachel, she was so self absorbed that I felt exhausted, to the extent that I found it hard to feel sorry for her when she is let down by all those around her.

(heads up: this review contains mentions of eating disorders, body dysmorphia, and explicit language)

2 ½ stars (rounded up to 3)

While I doubt that Milk Fed will win many awards, I sure hope that it wins the Bad Sex in Fiction Award. It 100% deserves to.

“Was it real freedom? Unlikely. 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.”


Milk Fed follows in the steps of novels such as My Year of Rest and Relaxation (or to name a few others: Pizza Girl, Luster, Exciting Times, Severance, Hysteria, The New Me...and no, this is by no means a comprehensive list). As I've said before in my review for Luster, these books are a hit or miss for me. And at first I thought that Milk Fed was a definite hit but after the 30% mark the novel became increasingly repetitive, annoyingly self-indulgent, and ludicrously sensationalistic. To me, Milk Fed reads like a less compelling version of You Exist Too Much. Both novels focus on young bisexual women who have a rather toxic relationship with their mother. They both suffer at one point or another from an eating disorder. They are self-destructive and directionless. Their attempts to seek therapeutic help do not go all that well. The narrator of You Exist Too Much does some fucked up things but ultimately I cared for and sympathised with her. It helped that I found her caustic wit to be genuinely funny. Milk Fed is all style and no substance. Perhaps those who can enjoy this kind of turgid prose may be able to find this novel amusing or insightful but it just reminded of all the reasons why I did not like Susan Choi’s My Education.
Also, fyi, I had an eating disorder. However, I would never describe myself as a ‘survivor’ nor do I believe that you can’t write a dark comedy about eating disorders. I like satire and cringe comedy (Succession and Fleabag are favourites of mine) but I am certainly not a fan of narratives that are solely intent on being as garish and gratuitous as possible.

Our narrator, Rachel, is an aimless twenty-something who in the very opening of the novel informs us that “It didn't matter where I worked: one Hollywood bullshit factory was equal to any other. All that mattered was what I ate, when I ate, and how I ate it”. Rachel thinks about food 24/7. She obsesses about calories, follows seemingly arbitrary eating rituals, exercises everyday not in order to get stronger or leaner but to burn as many calories as possible. She seems to view her troubling relationship to food and her body as preferable to ‘the alternatieve’ (not being ‘skinny’). She goes to therapy, “hoping to alleviate the suffering related to both my food issues and my mother, but without having to make any actual life changes in either area”. During one of these sessions her therapist recommends that Rachel should take a “communication detox” from her mother (suggesting at least 90 days of no contact).

“Do you want to be chubby or do you want boys to like you?”


We learn through brief flashbacks and Rachel’s recounting that one of the reasons why developed an eating disorder is her mother. As a child Rachel’s mother would shame her for eating things she believed were ‘unhealthy’ or ‘bad’ and imposed strict diets on Rachel. Rachel began to binge-eat (in secret), which made her gain weight. To ‘make up’ for it Rachel begins to eat less and less, which sees her becoming anorexic (when she confesses to her mother that she thinks she may be anorexic her mother dismiss this by saying something on the lines of her not being ‘skinny enough’ to be truly anorexic). Rachel’s mother is horrible and she gives the mother from You Exist Too Much a run for her money...but, unlike You Exist Too Much, here we only told bad things about Rachel’s mother. Because of Rachel’s ‘detoxing’ from her, she never makes an appearance in the actual story. Her presence certainly haunts Rachel but I wish she had not been portrayed in such a skewed way. Making someone embody only negative traits is a very easy way of making them unlikable or into the ‘bad guy’.

Rachel doesn’t care about her job ( I cannot precisely remember what she does other than it has to do with ‘Hollywood’) nor does she have any friends or hobbies (unless you count obsessing about food as a hobby). She is desperate for validation, which is perhaps why once a week she does stand up comedy for a night show called ‘This Show Sucks’. This thread of her life often felt unexplored and out of place. You could probably cut out the scenes she spends at this show and the story would be much the same (by the end this show’s main purpose seems to be that of a meeting place).
At work she has sort of bonded with an older woman who she sees both as a mother-figure of sorts and as an object of desire. This leads to some predictably gross incestuous fantasies that have a very Freudian feel to them as they exist mainly to indicate Rachel’s state of mind (and they have the added bonus of grossing the reader out). During one of these sexual fantasies, which goes on and on for quite a few pages, Rachel imagines being ‘mothered’ by this older female colleague. Later, when she begins bingeing again, she imagines having sex with this same colleague, only this time she is the one who is in doing the ‘dominating’.
Rachel’s first meets Miriam at the frozen yogurt shop where she usually gets a plain yogurt from (part of her eating routine). Miriam, who works at this shop, insists on giving Rachel a bigger portion of yogurt. Because of this Rachel is annoyed by Miriam. Added to that is Rachel repulsion towards Miriam’s body (she describes Miriam as being “medically obese”). However, Miriam’s nonchalance towards food and her body soon catch Rachel’s attention. Her initial repulsion gives way to lust, and the two women seem to ‘bond’ over the fact that they are both Jewish (Miriam however, unlike Rachel who does not seem to practice any Jewish rituals and does not believe in God, is Orthodox).
Miriam invites Rachel to her house and Rachel idealises her family and home-life. They all enjoy eating and cooking food, and their meals together are happy occasions.
Rachel believes that Miriam reciprocates her feelings and the two being a very one-way sexual relationship. Things, of course, do not go as planned. Rachel’s ups and downs with food, her self-hatred, her unresolved mummy issues, they all contribute to her self-destructive behaviour.
I probably wouldn’t have minded the book’s switch of focus (from Rachel’s ED to Rachel feelings for Miriam) if the relationship between Rachel and Miriam had not been wholly superficial. Miriam is reduced to the role of sex object. There are many instances were Rachel, and the readers, could have learnt more of her—what kind of person she is, her feelings towards Rachel, the way she sees herself, her future & desires, etc.—but we do not. What we get instead are many scenes about Rachel wanting to have sex with Miriam, obsessing over Miriam’s body, masturbating while thinking of Miriam or that her colleague, having sex with Miriam...the list goes on. The way Rachel’s thinks about Miriam’s body raised a few red flags and her attraction towards her sometimes verged on fetishising. She doesn’t think of Miriam but merely of Miriam’s body. Many of the metaphors used when the two are having sex or when Rachel is fantasising about her are food related (Rachel describes Miriam’s moles as “chocolate drops”, her tongue as a “fat piece of liver she was king enough to feed me”). She also loves watching her eat and is aroused when Miriam “slurp[s] dumplings”. Miriam’s “rolls of fat” are like “pussies” to Rachel. I don’t know...these descriptions were probably meant to be funny and weird but they mostly struck me as affected and cheap.
Most of the sex scenes in this novel were awful. They tried hard to be gritty and real but ended being the opposite: when watching a film with Audrey Hepburn Rachel imagines Audrey’s “concave thighs” and sticking her “mouth in her little pussy”; when she is holding Miriam’s hand she views this as an act of sexual intercourse, her finger is a “a cock, a penetrating object”; some of her fantasies included phrases such as “I activated Frankencock” or “It was like nipples were two clits”; when she is having sex with Miriam she smells “the faintest waft of shit coming up from underneath her. It smelled like fertile heaven: peat moss, soil, sod, loam”. Later in the novel she brags about fingering a guy to that older female colleague in order to impress her, feeling remorse in doing so. She never confronts her mother or this colleague, nor does she feel challenged or inspired by her relationship with Miriam. Yes, the more time she spends with Miriam, the less she restricts but throughout the course of the narrative she maintains an obsessive relationship with food and keeps assigning moralistic values to food. I never believed that she cared for Miriam, nor do I think that the relationship helped her somehow. Miriam...she did not strike me as a fully fleshed character. While her body is described in minute detail, her personality remains largely absent. Often, it seemed that Rachel viewed Miriam’s body as representing her ‘essence’. She likes going to the cinema, she’s Jewish, she seems to care for her family...other than that? Who knows!
Because this is a satire most of the characters exist in order to make fun of a certain type of person: we have Rachel’s manager, a woke ‘dude bro’, her older female colleague who is thin, mean, and enjoys belittling other people’s appearance etc., the famous actor who is kind of full of himself, the not very helpful therapist who sees fake deep things…
The narrative also had a thread involving a golem (Rachel creates it out of putty during one of her therapy sessions) and a series of dreams with Judah Loew ben Bezalel, and, to be perfectly honest, these were my favourite elements of Rachel’s story. Sadly however they do not play a huge role in the plot, and most of the narrative is dedicated to Rachel having sex or thinking about her ‘pussy’. Seriously, there were times when this book brought to mind WAP cause there are a few situations in which Rachel and Miriam are so ‘wet’ as to need mops.
I would not recommend this to those who have been affected by an ED. Although the author initially seemed to have captured many sentiments that resonated with me, Rachel’s ED is ultimately used as a source of humour. There are many grotesque scenes that serve very little purpose other than ridiculing her. And I’m very over books or films that feature characters who offhandedly remark ‘I tried to go bulimic once but like it didn’t work’ (then again, I had bulimia so I am a bit touchy on that particular front).
Anyway, this novel tries to be outrageous and subversive but it succeeds only in being gratuitous. This is the kind of satire that is all bark, no bite. The author’s commentary on modern work culture, eating disorders, contemporary society, religion, the Palestinian-Israel conflict ...is lacking.
Also, I find it hard to believe that Rachel, our supposedly shrewd girl, and this famous actor would get Frankenstein and Frankenstein's creature confused.
Still, just because I found Melissa Broder's story to be superficial and ultimately unfunny, does not mean that you should not give this novel a try (bear in mind however that this books has some pretty yucky and incest-y content).
“Here is a snippet which I did not enjoy but might very well appeal to other types of readers: Her hair was the color of cream soda, or papyrus scrolls streaked with night light. Her eyebrows were the color of lions, lazy ones, dozing in sunlight or eating butter at night with their paws by lantern. Her eyes: icebergs for shipwrecking. Lashes: smoke and platinum. Her skin was the Virgin Mary, also very baby. Her nose: adorable, breathing. Upper lip: pink peony. Lower lip: rose. The teeth were trickier, but her inner mouth was easy–Valentine hearts and hell.”

This novel most definitely needs a [food] content note. The main character, Rachel, swings wildly from obviously disordered eating, starving herself to appease her controlling mother, to bingeing to the point of making herself ill for the approval Miriam, who tries to seduce with appetite. Rachel’s distanced and strained relationship with her mother - “she could only see me as an extension of herself” - is never really resolved, despite being the catalyst for her sadness, and we never find out why her mother is so fixated on weight loss, which is really the only thing I wanted more of from this book. It’s a novel of excess, of food, sex, religion. The plot isn’t totally dissimilar from Broder’s first novel The Pisces, with a bit of magical realism and a culturally mismatched romance, and if you’ve got the stomach for it I highly recommend it.

Somewhere between 3-3.5

Whilst I had reservations about some aspects of Broder's fiction debut, The Pisces, it was one of the more memorable reads of of 2018 for me: the protagonist was unique and the content matter nothing like anything I'd read before.

So I was eager to check out her highly anticipated new novel, Milk Fed, hoping for a similar vibe. I don't think it's especially fair to compare the two novels directly, but this is a lot more mainstream and accessible in some respects, and I expect it won't divide as many readers for that reason.

Milk Fed follows Rachel, a 24-year-old woman working at a company in LA. A lapsed Jew, Rachel also has an eating disorder, and the first chapter is an intense baptism of fire into her mind; constant calorie counting and a miserable diet of muffin tops and not a lot else. This allows Rachel some semblance of control over her life, as well as hours spent daily at the gym. Her therapist suggests a 90 day detox ceasing communication with her mother, with whom she has a (very) unhealthy relationship.

The story then progresses as she meets a new employee at the frozen yoghurt store she frequents for her lunchtime treat, Miriam, an Orthodox Jewish woman who keeps giving Rachel more frozen yoghurt than she asks for and encouraging her to try different toppings (sprinkles are a particularly bad one for her, as she is concerned as to how she'll possibly count the calories). I won't spoil to much of the plot, but Rachel and Miriam become close and the rest of the book takes us on the journey of their friendship and the changes that happen to Rachel and her life as a result.

This contains some of the vivid sexual descriptions à la The Pisces, but feels less risqué overall. The narrative is quite accessible and the book very readable, I'm just not sure it conveyed the level of emotional insight the author was hoping to with the story.

I'd caution against reading this if descriptions of disordered eating are triggering for you.

Milk Fed by Melissa Broder is about a woman's complicated relationship with food and with her body and desires.

I want to read everything of Melissa Broder’s that I can get my hands on. So when I got the ARC for this I was beyond excited! It was everything I could have wanted and more and I ended up reading it in less than a day.

I love the way she writes, it’s not complicated but it’s raw, honest and self aware . She is one of those writers who write things I think and feel but i haven’t been able to put into words myself or express yet.

‘This absence of rejection felt like an embrace’