Melissa Broder's Milk Fed explores eating disorders and body dysmorphia

Milk Fed
by Melissa Broder
(Bloomsbury, $33)

Melissa Broder made a splash with her completely bonkers 2018 "merman novel", The Pisces. Now she returns with this genuinely inventive novel which explores eating disorders, body dysmorphia, religion, sexuality, and how the luscious pleasures of food and sex can be inextricably linked.

With Milk Fed, Broder is writing from personal experience, and with a startling lightness of touch manages to straddle the line between the heartbreakingly sad and riotously weird and comic. It's funny, it's tender, it's strikingly fresh and intensely sexual.

Twenty-something Rachel is a lapsed Jew who works for a Hollywood talent agency and moonlights as a stand-up comic. She has long been shackled to her noxious and controlling mother who has brutally body-shamed Rachel her whole life, resulting in an intense obsession with self-monitoring her calorie intake.

Adhering to a strict regime, each day Rachel chain-chews nicotine gum and orders the same specific joyless salad from Subway (turkey, no dressing, 160 calories) followed by a soft serve from the Yo! Gurt shop next door (only filled just to the lip of the cup, mind, or it becomes calorifically uncountable. And absolutely no sprinkles or sauces, thanks.)

For a treat she'll drink Lipton tea with a teaspoon of creamer and four Splenda so it's "like a milkshake". Her manipulative boss hazes her into eating at long work lunches. She despises him and Milk Fed is Broder's sly take-down of the entertainment industry. Rachel's relationship with food is her relationship with her body is her relationship with God. She's sexually and spiritually starving and for her, sex, food and God are all interdependent.

As a teenager suffering from an eating disorder, Rachel was taunted by her monster of a mother with her archaic ideas of dieting (including the 1970s fad of melon with cottage cheese) who cruelly tells an adolescent Rachel, "anorexics are much skinnier than you".

When Rachel's therapist suggests a communication detox from her mother for 90 days, Rachel suddenly meets Miriam, an unashamedly voluptuous attendant at Yo! Gurt who takes it upon herself to fatten Rachel up and nourish her with cloyingly sweet and luxuriously garnished sundaes, opening up a world of ecstatic excess and sensuous food indulgences which Rachel has previously denied herself.

She falls in love with eating. And with Miriam, who she describes as a "Kosher coquette". But Miriam is from a tight-knit and devoutly Jewish family and has a complex push-pull response to Rachel's desire.

Rachel imagines strange and vividly described mother-daughter sexual fantasies as she cries out for meaning through food and sex. All she really wants is the complete embrace of an infinite mother, absolute and divine, to lose the edges of herself and blend in. Broder really gets across the sheer exhaustion and constant mathematics of relentless calorie-counting and self-critique running through her head.

Broder's descriptions of food are moreish, silky and filled with hunger - and sadness. Strange, surreal and sometimes confronting, her strong sense of the pitch dark and mordantly funny recall the work of Ottessa Moshfegh. She is currently working on a television adaptation of the novel.

Reviewed by Kiran Dass