Milk Fed
by Melissa Broder
Bloomsbury
Twenty-four year old Rachel is a lapsed Jew whose life is ruled by what she eats, when she eats and how she eats. As a kid, after returning from going out with her overweight Jewish grandparents, her mother would ask for a full report of what she had eaten and castigate her. She remembers her mother saying “do you want to be chubby or do you want boys to like you?”
Rachel’s fascinating routine of food rituals actually prohibit her from having relationships or even friendships with anyone, but she would much rather have a relationship with a female. The eating rituals, nicotine chewing gum and burning off a certain amount of calories in a week means that her physical and emotional security is guaranteed.
That also means that she usually eats alone and has to spend three hours at the gym every night, peddling on the stationary bike or running on the elliptical machine to nowhere. Her only social outing is her regular stand-up gig at the comedy night – This Show Sucks, where she gives the crowd a version of her life that is seasoned with “but really it’s fine” bravado.
When her Los Angeles therapist suggests that she take a communication detox from her mother, the universe conspires to open her eyes and on day 7 of the detox, there before her is young Orthodox Jew Miriam. Working at her parent’s ice-cream shop, Miriam’s largeness exceeded Rachael’s worst fears for her own body and what’s more she looked as if she didn’t know or care that she was fat.
Rachel is entranced by Miriam … by her ice-cream sundaes, her body, her faith and her family connections. All her appetites seem to be awakened and masturbatory day dreams soon become a passionate reality, but Miriam has a severely constrained life thanks to her religion.
Rachael realises that she has to stop blaming her mother for her restricted life which supplies “a system for certainty – even if the very idea of human certitude, within the boundless mystery of existence, was, itself, false”. She wanted walls, but wanted them to be soft and womblike instead of being a frigid vault.
Miriam and Rachael both need to come to terms with what they have been fed all their lives in this incredibly erotic and thought-provoking tale of physical, sexual and spiritual appetites.
Lezly Herbert
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