Milk Fed

From the critically renowned author of The Pisces and So Sad Today, comes a viciously humorous, outrageously sexual, and ferociously creative tale about food, sex, and god.

Rachel is twenty-four, a lapsed Jew who has made calorie restriction her religion. By day, she works as an underling at a talent management firm in Los Angeles and maintains an appearance of existential control via her obsession with culinary routines. She doesn't cycle on the elliptical machine at night. Rachel is happy to continue living on the streets—that is, until her therapist suggests that she go on a ninety-day contact fast from her mother, who instilled in her the habit of calculating calories.

In the first stages of her detox, Rachel encounters Miriam, a svelte young Orthodox Jewish employee at her preferred frozen yoghurt store who is determined to provide her with food. Abruptly and intensely, Rachel finds herself enthralled with Miriam—her sundaes and her figure, her religion and her family—and as the two become more intimate, Rachel sets off on a trip that is characterised by mirrors, mysticism, mothers, milk, and honey.

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. One of our leading authorities on the psyche—both religious and profane—writes a poignant and riotously comic meditation on love, certitude, and the issue of what we are all being fed in Milk Fed.