Milk Fed

A scathingly funny, wildly erotic and fiercely imaginative story about food, sex and god from the Women's Prize longlisted author of The Pisces


Rachel is twenty-four, a lapsed Jew who has made calorie restriction her religion. By day, she maintains an illusion of control by way of obsessive food rituals. At night, she pedals nowhere on the elliptical machine.

Then Rachel meets Miriam, a young Orthodox Jewish woman 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.

Pairing superlative emotional insight with unabashed vivid fantasy, Melissa Broder tells a tale of appetites: of physical hunger, of sexual desire, of spiritual longing. 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.

Review

Every encounter is written with sumptuous detail, from glutting on nachos to intimate sex scenes (real and imagined), making for a simultaneously uncomfortable and revelatory read ― Evening Standard

Melissa Broder's exhilarating, bleakly funny Milk Fed is another study of female appetite . The most eroticised, tender and romanticised writing in this singular novel is of food' ― Sunday Times

Milk Fed is a rich, sensual comedy about the joys rather than the privations of the flesh, and with a large number of extremely filthy sex scenes. A funny, sexy, romance about transgressive desire and whipped cream ― Daily Mail

Melissa Border's imagination, which gave us the story of a woman falling in love with a merman in The Pisces, returns with another wonderfully strange story ― Esquire

[An] imaginative story about food, sex and God (yes, all three of those) ― Red

Weird, funny and filthy . Milk, motherhood, food, faith, sex and desire are all tangled in a mess of archetypes, delivered with a sarky millennial spin. Milk Fed will be too much for some - too list-y, too vulgar, too solipsistic - but others will delight in its excesses ― Sunday Telegraph

Deeply hilarious and embarrassingly relatable -- Samantha Irby, author of 'Wow, No Thank You'

Milk Fed hits that sweet spot where pleasure and tension intersect, where the sumptuous exploration of sexuality and spirit meets the rigidities of culture and society. Strange and surreal, Broder's writing is a marvel of wit, heart, and thoughtful curiosity about the body and mind and how these things can overflow their boundaries to become utterly new -- Alexandra Kleeman, author of 'You Too Could Have a Body Like Mine'

Sin as self-discovery, appetite as insight, transgression as transformation, Milk Fed is at once hilarious and heartbreaking; watching Broder's characters try to love themselves might just make you love yourself.... or at least hate yourself a little less -- Shalom Auslander, author of 'Mother for Dinner'

Smart, funny, sexy, and hard to put down. In this fast-moving, deeply compelling novel, Melissa Broder combines an unexpected (and very hot) love story with a sharp-edged examination of body image, religion, and cultural identity -- Tom Perrotta, author of 'Mrs. Fletcher'

Melissa Broder goes there and goes there again. Milk Fed is a hilarious and painfully accurate excavation of the female self-gaze, an erotic romp, a hyper witty satire of certain corridors of contemporary American culture and an unstoppable, wickedly seductive read -- Dana Spiotta

Physical hunger, sexual desire and spiritual longing merge in Broder's funny meditation on appetites ― Country & Town House

About the Author

Melissa Broder is the author of the novels Milk Fed and The Pisces, the essay collection So Sad Today and five poetry collections, including Superdoom. She has written for The New York Times, Elle, and New York Magazine's The Cut. She lives in Los Angeles.