Milk Fed: A Novel

My mother had never known me either, though it wasn’t because I hadn’t given her a chance. I’d given her a lot of chances. What was saddest was that she didn’t seem to want to know me, not as I was on the inside. I wasn’t even sure if she could grasp that I had an inside, that I was real. Sometimes it seemed impossible that she had ever given birth

When she called Kayla “fat and blundering,” I wasn’t sure if she was really talking about Kayla or about me. Sometimes I felt like she was laughing at me right to my face, like she and herself had become the “us” and I was the “them,” and the joke was that I didn’t know who was who. I figured that her comment was some kind of setup. She was trying

Miriam had traveled fewer places than I had. She still lived with her family and had no grand plans for any kind of career. Yet somehow, she seemed to be moving forward more freely than I was, or if not forward, then deeper and higher, in a series of infinite crescendos. While I was aggressively pedaling nowhere, she was orbiting peacefully.

My mother persuaded me to stay thin by insulting me. Ana did it by insulting everyone but me. This absence of rejection felt like an embrace.

I’d entered therapy hoping to alleviate the suffering related to both my food issues and my mother, but without having to make any actual life changes in either