Milk Fed: A Novel

This darkly hilarious and delicious new novel that ravishes with sex and food (The Boston Globe) from the acclaimed author of The Pisces and So Sad Today is a precise blend of desire, discomfort, spirituality, and existential ache (BuzzFeed).Rachel is twenty-four, a lapsed Jew who has made calorie restriction her religion. By day, she maintains an illusion of existential control, through obsessive food rituals, while working as an underling at a Los Angeles talent management agency. At night, she pedals nowhere on the elliptical machine. Rachel is content to carry on subsisting-until her therapist encourages her to take a ninety-day communication detox from her mother, who raised her in the tradition of calorie counting. Rachel soon meets Miriam, a zaftig young Orthodox Jewish woman who works at her favorite frozen yogurt shop and is intent upon feeding her. Rachel is suddenly and powerfully entranced by Miriam-by her sundaes and her body, her faith and her family-and as the two grow closer, Rachel embarks on a journey marked by mirrors, mysticism, mothers, milk, and honey. A ruthless, laugh-out-loud examination of life under the tyranny of diet culture (Glamour) Broder tells a tale of appetites: physical hunger, sexual desire, spiritual longing, and the ways that we compartmentalize these so often interdependent instincts. Milk Fed is riotously funny and perfectly profane (Refinery 29) from a wild, wicked mind (Los Angeles Times).