MILK FED begins with a relentless calorie count. Behind and beyond the numbers, and what Melissa Broder clues readers into immediately, is a terrible tension and an obsessive need. For Rachel, the 24-year-old comedian working in a thankless office job in Los Angeles, waking hours are ordered by a constant and painful reckoning of intake and exercise, an austerity that has nothing to do with health and everything to do with control. What happens to Rachel, in this dark, sexy, insightful and achingly honest novel, is a loss of control and what that means for her precarious inner life.

Rachel’s relationship with her mother is fraught, to say the least. Her mother has instilled in her a fear of being overweight since childhood. While Rachel recovered from an eating disorder and is in therapy, her eating continues to be disordered, and the abusive language of her mother is a running narrative in her mind. When her therapist recommends a 90-day detox --- that she should not speak to her mother for 90 days --- it seems to be an impossible task. Rachel lets her mother know that she needs time and space; this, coupled with the start of a passionate but secret relationship, both frees and challenges her to reconsider her own needs and health.

"MILK FED has a dreamy quality that swings between fantasy and nightmare. It is lusty and explicit, and full of possibility.... This is a smart, intense, wonderfully strange and erotic journey of freedom and love --- all kinds of love --- without conditions."

Rachel seeks warmth in a vision of religion and other homes after seeking comfort in food. During the maternal detox, she begins a brief and intense affair with Miriam. Miriam’s religiosity and physicality force Rachel to confront many layers of her own identity. Miriam’s Orthodox Judaism beckons to Rachel, who feels disconnected to the spirit of her own faith. And Miriam’s large body and joy in food and drink are compelling to Rachel as well. From the first yogurt sundaes that Miriam makes her, to Miriam’s body itself, Rachel finally allows herself to indulge in ways that bring her at least momentary contentment and peace from her mother’s admonitions. Their relationship, while freeing for Rachel, is one that Miriam’s family does not accept. Walking away from her family and community may not be a decision that she is willing or able to make.

Thus, for each woman, Judaism means both constraint and liberation, a symmetry that Broder handles with a subtlety and ease. As Rachel works to undo a lifetime of harm, and even as she gains strength and a better sense of self, heartbreak looms.

MILK FED employs some tired tropes: a smothering and nagging Jewish mom and an ineffective Jewish dad, for instance. Because Broder balances this with a playful imagining of the golem myth and imaginary conversations with the golem’s creator, Rabbi Judah Loew, and because she lets Judaism and Jewishness be realistically messy spaces for her characters, places of both expression and constraint, those stereotypical parents can be mostly forgiven.

Like Rachel’s parents, most characters remain one-dimensional throughout the novel, which works to allow Rachel to expand, in more ways than one. Time is tricky here. It is not precisely clear how much of it elapses. For a novel that digs into very real concerns about body image, eating, mental health and a variety of important relationships, MILK FED has a dreamy quality that swings between fantasy and nightmare. It is lusty and explicit, and full of possibility. Broder does a good job of describing Rachel’s sexual and familial longings and how all of it --- food, mothering, loving --- gets tangled up for her.

This is a smart, intense, wonderfully strange and erotic journey of freedom and love --- all kinds of love --- without conditions.