I wondered to myself how big that was going to go over. I will not be reachable for the next 90 days. So, Rachel sent her mother a text saying. “It was a phrase you’d associate with a person who didn’t need anything from anyone a closed system, an automaton.

Rachel‘s therapist said she should expect nothing. Rachel wasn’t expecting fanfare from her mother, but she thought she would at least be a little bit proud. When she texted her mother, she wrote, “how did they find you?” Rachel had just been chosen by a low-trafficked entertainment blog as one of 25 young female comics to watch. ’s raining here today in California-so I may skip my morning walk to sit on our spinnaker stationary bike.Īnd I ‘might’ say ‘ooo’ when I sit on the bike today. I’m sure readers will find fault - roll their eyes- say ‘ooo’ to themselves in parts. ( our daughter has been recovered for many years).īut I loved ‘Milk Fed’. So I tend to stay away from the topic today. (our daughter was hospitalized five times battling anorexic). Given that Rachel, our protagonist had an eating disorder, I shouldn’t have liked this book at all. The dialogue was fresh, in your face bold, smart & savvy. I read it in one sitting - not stopping to pee or make tea. 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. 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. 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.

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.Įarly in the detox, Rachel meets Miriam, a zaftig young Orthodox Jewish woman who works at her favorite frozen yogurt shop and is intent upon feeding her. At night, she pedals nowhere on the elliptical machine.

By day, she maintains an illusion of existential control, by way of obsessive food rituals, while working as an underling at a Los Angeles talent management agency. Rachel is twenty-four, a lapsed Jew who has made calorie restriction her religion. A scathingly funny, wildly erotic, and fiercely imaginative story about food, sex, and god from the acclaimed author of The Pisces and So Sad Today.

Milk fed a novel