“I’m very attracted to Miriam,” Broder confesses, adding, “In order for me to write sex stuff, I do have to turn myself on.” The personal history of sexual anxiety that Broder conjured in So Sad Today finds its most natural expression in Milk-Fed, with Rachel and Miriam engaging in sex that blurs the boundaries between what they want and what they’ve been taught to want. Miriam is able to experience genuine pleasure in food-pleasure that satisfies in the moment, and, necessarily, passes-while Rachel can’t let herself enjoy even some soft-serve frozen yogurt without turning it into a full-on binge, followed by a starvation ritual. When Broder describes her own passage into sobriety, which she eventually found her way to in her twenties, she does so in terms of joy-and appetite: “I wanted to sample what the world had to offer, and this included food.” This is the central conflict at work in Milk-Fed, the tension between skinny, miserable Rachel and her unabashedly fat lust object Miriam.

Milk-Fed’s preoccupation with what Rachel is and isn’t eating can be, at times, exhausting-in the way that actually suffering from an eating disorder can be exhausting-but Broder sees eating disorders as a kind of “monotheistic religion,” and her refusal to allude circuitously to Rachel’s problems in forgiving ellipses is strangely invigorating. “I am an eater who feels safest at a place of very thin,” she wrote in So Sad Today in that book, she detailed her experiences with anorexia, binge eating, laxatives, and a host of other hallmarks of disordered eating. The notion of a higher power is central to both a religious and eating-disorder-prone mentality, and Broder has written frequently about turning the latter into the former. Photo: Getty / Photo-illustration by Parker Hubbard

Milk fed book