MILK FED

In Melissa Broder's follow-up to The Pisces (2018), a young talent manager struggles to transform her relationship to desire.

Thanks to her mother's strict training, Rachel is obsessed with staying thin. "I was softly plump, like a dumpling," recalls Rachel of her childhood. Rachel's mother feared "future pain, frightened that I would grow up to be like her parents, whose obesity had caused her shame, or her fat cousin Wendy, who was unhappy." As a result, adult Rachel counts calories, allowing herself only squares of nicotine gum, diet snack foods, chemical sweeteners, and a sad procession of salads. At the behest of her therapist, Rachel finally attempts to set firmer boundaries with her mother and parent herself. While ignoring her mother's increasingly unhinged texts, Rachel meets Miriam, an Orthodox Jewish woman whose family owns Rachel's favorite frozen yogurt shop chain. Rachel is immediately drawn to Miriam, who is "undeniably...irrefutably fat" and unabashedly kind. Her desire marks the beginning of a major internal shift for Rachel—an acceptance, of sorts, of both fatness and queerness. When it comes to both sex and food, Broder is a formidable writer. She captures all the sticky sweetness, the pleasurable tensions between yearning and satiation. Instead of turning her sharp, acerbic eye on the internal ups and downs of recovery and coming out, however, Broder largely focuses on Rachel's outward expressions of desire. It's nice to think that setting boundaries with pushy family members and hopping into bed with a fat woman could heal Rachel's psyche. Unfortunately, a handful of rejected therapy sessions does not codependency, disordered eating, and internalized homophobia fix, and we don't get to see much, if any, of the internal observations that made The Pisces such a formidable debut. Even so, this novel offers a sad, funny romp about learning to let yourself want what you want, even if it means letting down the people whose acceptance you crave the most.

Bold, wry, and delightfully dirty.