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Hunger, appetite and the joy of denial

American writer Melissa Broder's work is very personal, sometimes shocking - and extremely Jewish

March 5, 2021 11:17
Melissa Broder (c) Lord Byron
5 min read

Melissa Broder has an agreement with her parents not to read her work. It’s probably wise, given she leans towards graphic, eyebrow-raising sex scenes.

Her memoir, So Sad Today, documented both her mental health struggles and her bedroom encounters (including a chapter devoted to sexts between her and a stranger); her first novel, The Pisces, told of a woman’s physical relationship with a mermaid. Disney, it wasn’t.

Milk Fed, her latest novel, is equally boundary-pushing, following an anorexic secular Jew called Rachel with a monotonous Hollywood job, who falls head over heels for Miriam, an overweight, Strictly Orthodox woman who works in a frozen yoghurt shop. Into that heady mix Broder weaves the golem story, an imaginary rabbi-therapist, and Rachel’s mother issues, and contemplates the connection between physical and spiritual lust and desire, food, and faith. It’s typically explicit; “I sucked it like a fat piece of liver she was kind enough to feed me” is one of the more reprintable lines suitable for a family newspaper.

Broder established her career as a poet. Her parents would read her work then. “That’s the nice thing about poetry, no one really knows what’s going on so you can get away with being filthy.” For her novels, though, it’s about “mutually agreed denial”. Her aunt is reading Milk Fed now; Broder nervously wondering where she’s up to. “I’m like has she got to the mother fantasy [a particularly uninhibited scene]? I feel bad, she shouldn’t be reading it.”

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