Milk Fed
by Melissa Broder
A young woman in LA with a fractured relationship with food and her own body falls for the girl at the frozen yogurt counter, a plus-size Orthodox Jewish woman whose comfort with herself is both magnetic and destabilizing. The book is about hunger in almost every sense of the word.
“I wanted to eat her up, to take in whatever it was she had that I didn’t.”
What It Actually Felt Like
Milk Fed is a book about hunger in every direction — food, desire, identity, spiritual longing — and Broder doesn’t clean any of it up. The Jewish mysticism woven through the story was a surprise and it added a dimension I wasn’t expecting.
Parts of it were genuinely a lot. The body stuff is explicit and some of the dynamics are uncomfortable by design. I came out the other side thinking I kind of liked it, which is a strange thing to say but the honest version.
The Honest Part
Know what you’re getting into before you start. The body-focused content is very present and very specific. This isn’t for everyone and that’s fine.
Who This Is For
Readers who like weird, uncomfortable literary fiction that doesn’t flinch from bodies and desire.
⭐⭐⭐ Different and weird and it kind of worked for me.
Tags literary fiction, queer, body image, Jewish themes, mood: uncomfortable and interesting
