October 19, 2020
Broder (The Pisces) delivers a bittersweet and erotic account of a woman’s intertwining relationship to food, her mother, and her sexuality. Rachel
, a lapsed Jew who works at a Los Angeles talent management agency by day and does stand-up comedy by night, has suffered from anorexia since childhood. But things begin to change after her therapist suggests she take a 90-day communication detox from her overbearing and controlling mother, whose own relationship with eating and fatphobic comments have long contributed to Rachel’s body image troubles. After Rachel meets Miriam, a food-loving Orthodox Jewish woman, and embarks on a passionate affair with her, Rachel breaks her self-imposed “Spartan regimen,” rediscovers life’s simple pleasures, and tries to figure out what will bring her true happiness. With luscious descriptions of delectable foods and fantastical romps through Rachel’s imagination, the novel oscillates between serious and playful, obsessive and free, and explores the difficulties of loving oneself in a world that prizes thinness above all else. This poignant exploration of desire, religion, and daughterhood is hard to resist. Agent: Meredith Kaffel Simonoff, DeFiore & Co.
December 1, 2020
In Melissa Broder's follow-up to The Pisces (2018), a young talent manager struggles to transform her relationship to desire. Thanks to her mother's strict training, Rachel is obsessed with staying thin. "I was softly plump, like a dumpling," recalls Rachel of her childhood. Rachel's mother feared "future pain, frightened that I would grow up to be like her parents, whose obesity had caused her shame, or her fat cousin Wendy, who was unhappy." As a result, adult Rachel counts calories, allowing herself only squares of nicotine gum, diet snack foods, chemical sweeteners, and a sad procession of salads. At the behest of her therapist, Rachel finally attempts to set firmer boundaries with her mother and parent herself. While ignoring her mother's increasingly unhinged texts, Rachel meets Miriam, an Orthodox Jewish woman whose family owns Rachel's favorite frozen yogurt shop chain. Rachel is immediately drawn to Miriam, who is "undeniably...irrefutably fat" and unabashedly kind. Her desire marks the beginning of a major internal shift for Rachel--an acceptance, of sorts, of both fatness and queerness. When it comes to both sex and food, Broder is a formidable writer. She captures all the sticky sweetness, the pleasurable tensions between yearning and satiation. Instead of turning her sharp, acerbic eye on the internal ups and downs of recovery and coming out, however, Broder largely focuses on Rachel's outward expressions of desire. It's nice to think that setting boundaries with pushy family members and hopping into bed with a fat woman could heal Rachel's psyche. Unfortunately, a handful of rejected therapy sessions does not codependency, disordered eating, and internalized homophobia fix, and we don't get to see much, if any, of the internal observations that made The Pisces such a formidable debut. Even so, this novel offers a sad, funny romp about learning to let yourself want what you want, even if it means letting down the people whose acceptance you crave the most. Bold, wry, and delightfully dirty.
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December 1, 2020
Twentysomething Rachel is basically a calorie-counting app in human form when readers first meet her. A funny one, though, as she also does stand-up. Rachel doesn't let her soulless work at an L.A. talent management agency get in the way of her meticulous meal planning, constant nicotine-gum chewing, and maniacal exercising. One fateful day, Rachel finds that the Orthodox Jewish boy who works at Yo!Good, the frozen yogurt shop she visits daily, has been replaced by his sister. Adiv knew to fill her yogurt cup just to the lip. But gorgeous Miriam, who ""surpassed plump, eclipsed heavy,"" can't believe Rachel really wants her to stop there, and insists on making overflowing, topping-laden creations for her instead. So begins their sexy romance and an altogether seismic unlocking in Rachel, who's also undertaking a therapist-ordered 90-day detox from her mother. Welcomed into Miriam's warm family for Shabbat, Rachel accesses the Reform Judaism of her childhood with ease. But, as she suspected, there are rules. As in her terrific first novel, The Pisces (2018), spell-caster Broder guides readers through this seriously tender tale of transformation with seamless humor and staggering smarts: it contains multitudes. An empathic, enrapturing, unputdownable novel of faith, sex, love, and nurture.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Twitter star and prize-winning novelist Broder is in the fiction hot zone.
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