Melissa Broder’s hilarious novel came across my feed when I was looking for contemporary queer literature to update my intro course. It perfectly combines anxiety about (over)eating and anxiety about overbearing mothers. No, it illustrates the connections between hunger for food and the craving to be loved just as one is. It’s pretty clever and witty about the silliness of Hollywood workplace dynamics. There are some extremely enticing descriptions of frozen yogurt concoctions and not one but two amazing Shabat scenes. And there is a golem. Maybe.
The protagonist is Rachel, a 24 year old woman who chews nicotine gum, among other ridiculous things, to restrict her eating. She has a therapist who says “insight-adjacent things” (LOL–I think I’ve met this therapist). Here’s a really wonderfully authentic (funny-sad) paragraph:
Hearing Ezra use the word mama made me feel a pang of longing. I was not really longing for my mother, who certainly was no mama. I wanted another mama, a fictional one. I thought about what my dream mama would look and feel like. Would she be like Mrs. Schwebel? Would she be like Ana? If it were possible to create the mama I’d wished for, I wasn’t even sure who she would be. My wish for that mama had always been a response to an absence. I didn’t know how to think about a mama in terms of presence. In my fantasies, I’d cobbled together scraps–fragments of women who’d crossed my path. I’d never come up with a mama from scratch.
