Melissa Broder isnât trying to be provocative. Itâs just who she is

On the Shelf
Milk Fed
By Melissa Broder
Scribner: 304 pages, $26
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Five minutes into our first call, Melissa Broder makes good on her reputation for having no filter. In a slightly shaved down, back-mouthed Philadelphia accent, she says that even though her agent âcut about 50%â of references to the clitoris in her new novel, âMilk Fed,â she still had to apologize to the sound tech monitoring her audiobook recording. âI know itâs Monday,â she told him, âIâm really sorry. Itâs 11 a.m. and youâve heard the word ⊠like, 30 times already out of my mouth.â
âMilk Fedâ is a romp. The story of a calorie-obsessed L.A. loner on Hollywoodâs bottom rung who falls for a plus-size woman she meets at a froyo shop, it is also a pageant of bodily juices and exploratory fingers and moan after moan of delight. There is, after all, a giant, pert, pink nipple on its cover, like a Kandinsky drawn with a protractor.
âSex is my North Star,â Broder says. In her first novel, âThe Pisces,â a disaffected Sappho scholar named Lucy has a love affair with Theo, a merman. âAs we kissed,â she recounts, âI imagined eating his tail with garlic butter.â Itâs one of the novelâs tamest moments. Later, thereâs a scene involving menstrual blood thatâs queasy but also freeing; her writing regularly performs an emotional tango with those two sensations.
Broder made her name with the Twitter handle @sosadtoday, dispensing soul-deflating aphorisms to a million-plus followers, a modern depressiveâs Poor Richardâs Almanack. The feed spawned an essay collection of the same name, displaying Broder in full flower. She described her first orgasm at age 10, âhumping a four-foot George Jetson doll while a homemade tape of vomitingâ played on her Walkman. One essay is mostly a copy-pasted text thread containing fantasies about sex in an air shaft, 127 straight hours of oral pleasure and favoriting tweets mid-orgasm. Itâs one of the woes of my writing life that newspaper conventions prevent me from providing more detail. (Her parents, in case you are worrying, do not read her work.)
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If youâre a little shocked, well, thatâs intended. But Broder comes by her provocations honestly. They are born of her compulsion to reveal the strangest or darkest or ugliest parts of herself before someone else can expose her.
Broder says âMilk Fedâ began in college as âthe worst short story everâ but lingered in her mind for years afterward. After living in L.A. for several years, the author, who grew up in Phillyâs Main Line suburbs, felt pulled back into the story. âI started feeling this longing for the culture of deism of my childhood ⊠the warm, holy feelingâ of a higher power. Not to mention a good nosh: âMy early memories of my religion education would be building a sukkah out of graham crackers and icing it at Hebrew school, and then stealing the ingredients and binge-eating the sukkah.â

Out of this nostalgia emerged Rachel, a talent agency drone detached from her East Coast parents but still beholden to her motherâs invectives about her weight (âthe religion of our household: abstain! abstain! abstain!â). Her one-woman cult of low-cal servitude chugs along miserably until she meets voluptuous Miriam, the beloved daughter of a close Modern Orthodox family. They eat, they grope, they bang up against the myths of their selves.
Itâs a story E.M. Forster could have mapped out perfectly in âAspects of the Novel.â The narrative arc ratchets up from hand-holding to fondling and at its climax there is, of course, a climax. It also snuggles right into the sweet spot of Broderâs interests, where misery and raunch overlap. ââMilk Fedâ is really a story of the appetite,â Broder explains. Sex becomes a gateway drug, a means to gobble up someone elseâs life. If you can revel in someone elseâs abundance, you donât need any of your own.
Rachel lives with just a couch and bed â a rug is âtoo much commitmentâ â âin the mid-city, mid-Wilshire, Miracle Mile area,â a nothingish home in a nowhereish neighborhood. Broderâs house, meanwhile, is on a twisty street in the hills north of UCLA, and the little corner I can see is unblemished white: a leather couch, a sheepskin pillow and crisp walls, all hardly distinguishable from one another.
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âI could live in an empty room and be fine, a sparse white, like nothingness,â Broder says. She wears all black, with two gold necklaces, a simple chain and a nameplate that reads âNicky,â for her husband. Her âcrew,â she says laughing, is just him and her beloved rescue dog, Pickle. She meditates twice a day, walks UCLAâs campus listening to Italo Calvino on tape, dictates her work to Siri and shops at Gelsonâs. Thatâs it. No hobbies. Hardly any TV. But when she spins her laptop to show me the rest of her space, there are piles of books and tossed sweaters. The detritus of life is just out of frame, the tension between order and chaos self-evident.
âMy oldest relationship is my fraught relationship with food and my body,â she says while chewing a piece of Nicorette, a $200-a-month panacea for all her former habits (alcohol, drugs, smoking, binge-eating â âitâs, like, how many things can you quit?â). When she was a child, her mother would ask, âDo you want to be a chubbette or do you want boys to like you?â In her essay âI Want to Be a Whole Person but Really Thin,â Broder details her lifelong caloric numbers game. She was anorexic in high school and spent months eating only fat-free muffins and chicken. âThere have been very few days in the past eight years that I havenât had a microwave yam with Splenda in it.â
Minus the yam, Rachelâs life follows a similar pattern. She is âin recoveryâ from disordered eating too, Broder says, âbut how much recovery can a person expect? What do we expect of ourselves?â And what does recovery even mean when every addiction is supplanted with a new one? Is nothing the only antidote to everything?

Rachel meets Miriam during a 90-day communication detox from her ranting mother. Miriam is sweet and breezy, âwith light blue eyes and a braid of wheat-blond hair.â But what calls to Rachel is her body. Miriam âwas fat: undeniably fat, irrefutably fat. She surpassed plump, eclipsed heavy. She was fat,â and hereâs Rachelâs own insecurity talking, âand she exceeded my worst fears for my own body.â
The attention to Miriamâs shape is unrestrained, as detailed and worshipful as the drool-soaked paeans to pixie women in so many (menâs) fictions. Rachel revels in her new interestâs big body the same way she delights in their shared food â a âwildly volcanicâ ice cream sundae, the savory delights of the Golden Dragon Chinese restaurant, a luscious Shabbat dinner. She wants âto feel her big belly against mineâ; when they eventually take their clothes off, she calls Miriamâs body âfull of gravity, pale and momentous.â Broder offers that the two women function like a yin and yang: âMiriam is free in the ways that Rachel struggles and the ways that Rachel is limited.â But that implies a balance we donât always see; this is primarily Rachelâs story, and Miriam the object of her fascination.
A thin, conventionally photogenic writer indulging in a sex-positive feminist variant of the male gaze might not go over well in the current cultural discourse, but this isnât a pose. Broder is married to a man but has dated women. In âSo Sad Todayâ she writes, âI lust the zaftig female body. ⊠I donât watch a lot of porn but a typical search for me is âfat lesbians.ââ Itâs âa beautiful fantasy,â she continues, âto be accepted and embraced and adored as your biggest self, the most you, by a woman who is her fullest her.â That fantasy spills over into âMilk Fed,â which raises the question of whether wanting someone else elevates or diminishes them.
Writing the two women as if they were Jack Sprat and his wife would feel reductive if it werenât for all the complications Broder throws in the mix. Rachel fetishizes Miriamâs body, but she is clearly desperate for any organic source of life-sustaining milk. Fill the void, the novel practically screams. âPhysical hunger, sexual desire, spiritual longing and familial yearningâ canât be compartmentalized, Broder says. Appetite can starve you â or sustain you.
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Tucked up in her house, working on the screenplay for a âMilk Fedâ TV series (âThe Piscesâ will be a film, starring Claire Foy), Broder has more than enough to sustain herself, she says. âI have Nicorette, the internet, and the fear of being nothing, which I ameliorate with writing.â She no longer requires the carapace of the miserable Twitter lady. In a way, sheâs in recovery from sadness itself. Her tools? Lots of transcendental meditation, an anxiety journal, âa little magical cocktailâ of Effexor and Prozac. âI feel less and less involved and attachedâ to social media, she says. âAt this point, itâs just the dregs of a dopamine addiction.â And, finally, she has her wild, wicked mind.
Kellyâs work has been published in New York magazine, Vogue, the New York Times Book Review and elsewhere.
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