Melissa Broder might be the saddest and loneliest woman on the planet despite her pretty face, long hair, skinny body, and exquisite perceptiveness. Her writing is a brilliant non-stop rant of sorts, written in a first-person jet-fueled voice that often dips deeply into manic blizzards of rage and confession intermingled with insatiable bouts of lust doing battle with a pervasive self-hatred that continues to threaten her. The author admits to having spent years abusing her body with drugs, alcohol, and food binging and purging until her late twenties when she finally decided not to. Or at least began to try. She embarked on therapies of all kinds, while continuing to count calories with a menacing scariness. She could obsess for hours about how many calories might be hiding inside an average size potato.
As for her mother, she withdrew from her and reunited many times while unable to find comfortable ground. Broder describes her mother as cold, critical, and withholding, particularly when it came to Broder’s weight which they battled about since her childhood. Broder always had trouble finding solace and one day in desperation she sent a limp tweet into the Twittersphere claiming only that she was “so sad today.” That tweet, and the ones that followed, gained many followers and eventually thrust her into Twitter fame and over a million followers. Her first essay collection, “So Sad Today,” is an extended set of reflections about her search for happiness. But happiness remained elusive; the shame, anxiety, and depression that had always been her steady companions persisted, along with the rumblings of a fluid sexuality that lay beneath much of her prose.
Her new second novel, Milk Fed, explores her interior landscape in fictional form and we feel her breathing down on every page. Her protagonist and alter-ego Rachel is a 24-year-old lapsed Jew, who is struggling with the remnants of a serious eating disorder. Rachel goes to work each day in some bland office obsessing only about food, and longing for the approval of a mean workmate named Ana who seems overly interested in Rachel’s appearance as the sole indicator of her worthiness. After work, there is the gym where she works out robotically unaware of those around her. Her mother keeps calling her and Rachel has begun to duck and weave from her intrusiveness, but even when absent, her mother’s presence looms, shedding toxicity. The sexual encounters Rachel occasionally engages in are fleeting and leave her feeling shamed. She tends to think of them as some sort of perverse performance art.
We sense Rachel is looking for her authentic self, but if confronted with that term, she would probably laugh and mock it rather than embrace its seriousness. Rachel herself claims, “I was terrified of being rejected. I didn’t want to be a loser. That was the word that came into my head whenever I risked caring about someone: Loser. I couldn’t remember my mother ever saying it to me. It was something I must have come up with all by myself. What did it mean, anyway?” Rachel does this a lot; she dances around meaningful reckonings and runs away from them before they can take form. Almost all her energy goes into pleasing those she cares nothing about.
But a random encounter with another Jewish girl named Miriam rocks her world. Miriam is a zaftig Orthodox woman, and an innocent who wears her sweetness on her sleeve. She works in a yogurt shop Rachel frequents and lavishes Rachel with exotic sundaes hoping to please her. They meet first as ‘friends’, delighting in Chinese dinners and going to old movies together after which they walk the streets in a strangely comforting silence. She is invited to Miriam’s home for Shabbat and the warmth of Miriam’s large Jewish family overtakes her. Miriam is drawn to Rachel but also inextricably tied to the world of her parents. One night at the movies Rachel takes Miriam’s hand thinking, “With this simple gesture, I felt nearer to her than anyone. Her hand in my hand was a deeper intimacy that any sexual act, all my past performances of pleasure.” They begin to have passionate rendezvous at Rachel’s apartment; neither of them daring to discuss openly what is happening between them. Rachel delights in Miriam’s plumpness; the folds of fat that envelop her body; the joy she takes in the simple pleasures life offers. But Miriam eventually begins to withdraw from Rachel, pressured by her family who sense there is something unkosher about the girls’ friendship.
Broder uses her alter-ego Rachel to show us what it really feels like to experience utter brokeness. Rachel loves Miriam and is losing her and sensing this thinks to herself, “The heart gets wounded — so what? I thought. I’d seen all the plays. I should have been prepared. Love goes. ut what I hadn’t known was how good the love would feel when it was there, like a hymn moving through me all the time. Or if the Jews didn’t have hymns, then a rhythm. I’d moved my body in time to it the best I could. But I hadn’t been able to hold on.”
Broder’s Rachel feels electrifying real. We are placed for the entirety of the novel inside Rachel’s head — not always a comfortable place to linger. Occasionally we wither and squirm as Rachel loses herself in meaningless chases for truth that seem to show an eclipsed view of the world. She has trouble viewing anything from the vantage point of another. Her need for validations aborts such efforts. But perhaps Broder is trying to show us that psychic pain is real and can amputate our ability to see things around us and perceive other people’s needs more clearly. Rachel’s mind is filled with chaos — and has complicated circuitry that keeps her often going in circles. There are moments she appears ready to break free but somehow something keeps pulling her back into a tortured maze of her own making. We come to see the world as she does and feel her agony.
Broder is a powerhouse of a writer who has produced a piece of work that demonstrates how contemporary voices like hers are taking us to places we haven’t been before. And I’m grateful for her fearlessness.
[Published by Scribner on February 2, 2021, 304 pages, $26.00 hardcover]