Danika reviews Milk Fed by Melissa Broder

Milk Fed by Melissa Broder

There are some books–very rarely–that I read and form such a personal attachment to that I don’t want to share them with the world. This is one of them. I picked it up based on the fact that it was queer and had a blurb from Carmen Maria Machado; that was about all I knew about it. It turned out to be an immersive, raw, sometimes overwhelming reading experience.

Content warning: Discussion of disordered eating, self-loathing, internalized homophobia.

This follows Rachel, a twenty-something woman who is obsessed with food. She carefully counts calories and dutifully exercises to keep thin. She is ravenous. Every moment she is awake, she is thinking about food. She was raised to prize and police her body, and despite this tight control she keeps over her weight, it’s never enough for her mother. Rachel is a woman repressed. She is either bisexual or a lesbian, but she’s pushed that down most of her life. She desperately wants her mother’s approval, and she feels like her hunger is bottomless. In her mind, she has to exert this control because if it slips for a moment, she will spin out of control. She will never stop eating. She will never stop gaining weight.

During a session, her therapist asks her to do two things: 1) To go on a 90 day communication detox from her toxic mother, and 2) To sculpt her fear of gaining weight. Rachel agrees, and she uses all of the clay available to her to sculpt a fat woman. Her therapist says, “I think she’s quite lovely. And I think she’s worthy of love–more than worthy of love, actually. Don’t you think so?” Rachel storms out of the session and doesn’t return.

The next day, she goes to get her daily low-fat yogurt (no toppings, filled just to the line) and meets a new employee: a beautiful fat woman who fills her cup past the line and comps her some sprinkles. Rachel is panicked: this does not fit into her calorie plan. Instead of throwing the extra yogurt out, though, she finds herself devouring it, and coming back every day. Soon, she is falling for Miriam, and every time they are together, she finds herself veering from her controlled food plan.

The main character struggles with her repressed sexuality, her issues with food and her body, and her mother issues, and those all get tangled up in each other–which is my way of trying to tactfully give a content warning for her fantasizing sexually about a (fictional) mother/daughter relationship. She is looking for mother figures in the wrong places, desperately wanting the unconditional love she never received as a child.

This is a darkly comic book that had me highlighting and underlining on almost every page. On her first boyfriend: “I began dating him by default when one night, in his car, he put his hand on my thigh and I was too hungry and tired to deal with moving it. I ended things a few months later, when I got the energy to move it.” Her assessment of her therapist: “She was probably someone who genuinely enjoyed a nice pear.” On approval: “What I wanted most was for this certified hot person to see a hotness in me, thereby verifying, once and for all, that I was hot. It wasn’t that civilians didn’t find me attractive. But for a licensed hot person to verify me? That was the real shit.”

I found myself reading this book compulsively. I fell completely into Rachel’s worldview and couldn’t tear myself away. If you are someone who struggles with disordered eating or body image issues, this isn’t a book to pick up lightly. In a way, I was reading Rachel like Rachel was watching Miriam: as the fear and the secret dream. The idea of being so in control, contained, and thin is attractive–even though I know those thoughts are extremely unhealthy. At the same time, it was a cathartic read. Over the course of the book, Rachel goes from extreme restriction to feeling out of control to discovering something like balance. It’s a book that asks, What is your worst fear of your body? Isn’t that person worthy of love?

“Just because it feels good doesn’t mean it’s wrong,” said the rabbi.

This book had me almost in tears several times. I think that many–most?–women fear being out of control, and often feel like they’re right on the precipice of it. This story asks, What happens if you let go? If you fed that hunger until it was appeased? “What do you have to lose?” the Rabbi in her dreams asks. What is so desirable for Rachel about being thin, hungry, and alone?

Rachel has been sexual, but as an object more than a subject. She’s only ever craved being desired. With Miriam, she’s discovering desire, discovering herself as sexual agent. It’s also a celebration of fatness. The beauty and freedom of fat. And it’s a rediscovering of her body, learning to listen to what it needs and desires. This doesn’t have a romance ending, but it’s the messy, imperfect close this story needs. She doesn’t and shouldn’t get everything she wanted. But she can be kinder to herself and stop going to the hardware store for milk.

Honestly, this is just scratching the surface of Milk Fed. I haven’t even mentioned how much discussion of Judaism is here–Miriam is devout, while Rachel is lapsed and is trying to rediscover her relationship with it. And I haven’t really talked about Miriam’s character at all, or the ups and downs of their relationship. Still, I hope this review gives you some sense of the journey I went through reading this. It was a cathartic, immersive read that I will not be able to forget.

Shira Glassman reviews The Dyke and the Dybbuk by Ellen Galford

dyke-and-the-dybbuk

Ellen Galford’s The Dyke and the Dybbuk is, for only being eighteen years old, fairly iconic and hallowed in the tiny subgenre in which I spend most of my writing time. In other words, it may very well be the first great piece of sapphic Jewish fantasy. If I’m wrong, I’d love to know about more! In any case, it was a pleasure to read–sarcastic, sardonic, hopeful, enthusiastic, both a love story to our culture and a sharp criticism of some of its more tiresome features.

The initial premise stems from a trope some people may find painful, but is all too realistic thanks to the way society overwhelmingly pressures cis women to marry cis men. Namely, two young women in historical Jewish Eastern Europe are in love, until one of them leaves to marry a man. The jilted woman (herself somewhat of an outcast for her mixed parentage) responds by cursing the bride with demon possession. Thus enter our “what if Loki was a lesbian” demon, the hilarious–and also sapphic–dybbuk of the title. But she winds up imprisoned in a tree instead of being able to haunt the married woman and her daughters and granddaughters per the curse’s instructions, so it isn’t until the ninth generation of offspring that she gets a chance to escape and begin her assignment.

And this ninth generation is a British lesbian film critic who drives a taxi for her day job.

Rainbow Rosenbloom’s more at odds with her Judaism than I am, but, firstly, the book was written in an earlier generation, and secondly, there are pretty much twice as many ways to be Jewish as there are actual Jews in the world. I am confident that her experiences accurately reflect many other people’s relationship with their Jewishness. She’s surrounded by paternal aunts and she’s over-aware of the ways her preference for women—as well as her self-chosen first name, and also eating treyf–puts her in direct opposition to the way they want her to live.

The dybbuk decides that Rainbow’s already weird enough and has already maxed out ‘acting out’, so she can’t possibly make her look any weirder by ordinary possession. Therefore, she decides as her project she’s going to give Rainbow a massive crush on–Riva, a married Orthodox woman with six children! So suddenly, she’s super interested in her faith in a way she never was before (the irony being that it’s only because of a demon’s influence.) In comes an intense crush that I totally recognized from various straight girls I’ve crushed on.

Now, I have a soft spot for pious women, so like the sucker I am, I did fall hook line and sinker for the Rainbow/Riva ‘ship in this book. Spoiler warning: the author went somewhere else, but that’s okay. The book does deliver happy f/f endings, and even the demon herself gets to have some fun.

As far as the issue of how the book made me feel as a bisexual woman — the line “trendy bisexual” was used at one point in dialogue, but I do feel like any criticism of bi women’s choices was intended as unreliable narrator because from what I can remember it’s followed up with a reminder that they don’t actually know if the olden-days bride was bi or if she just married a man to appease cultural traditions which is extremely possible, given the circumstances. I beg of those reading this review to please be gentle with me if your experiences lead you to feel differently, because the week after I read the book my spouse ended our thirteen year relationship and so 1. I am not particularly able to hold my own in discourse at the moment and 2. I am writing this a month after reading the book and after a considerable amount of pain, so my memory isn’t perfect.

Either way, if you’re a Jewish woman who likes women, it’s worth checking out even if you aren’t a fan of spec fic. The speculative elements are lighthearted and easy to process–among themselves, the demons’ society is a parody of modern corporate culture and office politics. It’s out of print right now but worldcat.org has it listed in libraries all over the place, and I had no trouble getting a hold of it through interlibrary loan, so if you don’t mind using the system—and plenty of librarians told me that using a library actually helps libraries and isn’t a strain on them at all—it should be relatively easy. Besides, used copies are not hard to find.

Content warning: I have vague memories of there being the g-slur (for Rromani) in there someplace.

olive-conspiracyThank you for taking the time to read my review! I write more of them at http://shiraglassman.wordpress.com and on Goodreads, or check out my latest book, The Olive Conspiracy, Jewish fantasy about a young lesbian queen who must work together with her found-family, including her wife, a dragon, a witch, and a warrior woman, to save their country from an international sabotage plot.