MILK FED by Melissa Broder

Rachel, our first-person narrator, has trouble finding a happy medium.  She has an unhealthy fixation on calorie-counting, partly thanks to her body-shaming mother, but when she does throw caution to the wind, she over-indulges in a big way.  Her sexual fantasies are equally over the top, especially after she meets plus-sized frozen yogurt scooper Miriam.  In fact, Rachel’s sexual appetite for a large woman is entwined with her food consumption of cakes, donuts, bread, you name it, when she lapses into an eating binge.  I get that Rachel has some mental health issues, for which she sees a therapist who insists that she put all contact with her mother on pause.  However, Rachel makes some unwise choices, such as blabbing to a co-worker about having sex with a male client.  This attempt at propping up her fragile ego has serious repercussions and certainly does not have the desired result of elevating Rachel’s status with the co-worker.  The good news is that Rachel’s relationship with Miriam does raise her self-image and her spirits, but her argument with Miriam’s Jewish Orthodox mother about the plight of Palestinians, although her stance may be laudable, gets her thrown out of Miriam’s home.  One problem I had with the book was at least one inconsistency in Rachel’s food mania.  Why does she have to go to Bed, Bath & Beyond to find a scale to weigh herself?  OK, I don’t profess to know anything about eating disorders, but if she were obsessed with her weight, wouldn’t she own a bathroom scale?  Does this have to do with the fact that she sees herself as a much heavier woman than she actually is, and the scale would force her to face the truth?  Sometimes I want to get to the end of a novel to find out what happens, and sometimes I want to finish so that I can move on to something else.  This book falls into the latter category.