Milk Fed

Rachel is a twenty-four-year-old lapsed Jew working a thankless job at a Los Angeles talent agency and doing stand-up on the side. Her days are ruled by an exhausting arithmetic of calories, exercise, and self-denial — an austerity that has nothing to do with health and everything to do with control. When her therapist orders her onto a ninety-day "detox" from her domineering mother, the scaffolding of Rachel's carefully starved life starts to wobble.

Then she meets Miriam, a warm, zaftig young Orthodox Jewish woman who works at Rachel's favourite frozen-yogurt shop and is determined to feed her. Rachel becomes utterly entranced — by Miriam's sundaes and her body, her faith and her boisterous family — and as the two grow closer, she is pulled into a headlong reckoning with hunger, desire, religion, and her mother.

Dark, funny, sexually frank, and achingly honest, Melissa Broder's Milk Fed is a novel about eating disorders and appetite in every sense, and about the terrifying, liberating loss of control that comes with finally letting yourself want.