Rachel’s whippet-thin body is the ultimate manifestation of her will, and the extremely demanding and rigid routine of eating and exercising allows her to block out all else, including her dissatisfaction with her job at a bro-ish talent agency - until it doesn’t.

Reflecting on her sparsely furnished, monochrome apartment, she has the self-awareness to note, “I felt that committing to a rug would mean I existed on the planet more than I actually wanted to exist.” Her mind is holding the line, but only barely. A lapsed Jew whose only family tradition is counting calories, at 24 she has internalized the critical and unloving mother who equated fat with failure and slimness with success. As the book opens, Rachel, our protagonist and the book’s narrator, is at war with herself. In her latest, Milk Fed, the body and the spirit are once again at odds in a battle that becomes externalized into another impossible affair. Weird, and weirdly arousing, the story dove deeper, of course, when the impracticality of the relationship tapped into its protagonist’s desire for annihilation, an Eros-Thanatos face off for the ages. In Broder’s first novel, The Pisces, the conflict took the form of merman erotica, as a lonely Los Angelena found mind-blowing sex with a mythical half-man half-fish. For the Los Angeles–based poet and novelist, the two mix and merge in a constant tug of war, and the results are unexpected, explicit, and, well, weighty. The spirit is never far from the flesh for Melissa Broder, but it’s never superior to it, either. For all the sensual lushness of Melissa Broder’s writing, that hard center remains, one where appetite invites awareness, bringing with it pain as well as satiety.

Melissa broder milk fed