Milk Teeth

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Despite these moments in which the narration is given the control that the narrator so desires, this novel is full. Obs menar inte att förminska en ätstörning men den skrivs fram som ett litet sidosp��r utan att på riktigt bemötas eller verka ha några konsekvenser. A girl grows up in the north of England amid scarcity, precarity and the toxic culture of heroin chic, believing that she needs to make herself smaller to claim presence in the world.

the writing is full of sparkly words that don’t really mean anything and the same metaphors are slammed again and again. What will become of her independence if she chooses to stay with this man who is establishing a life for himself? I still haven’t got around to reading Jessica Andrews’ debut, Saltwater, leapfrogging over the copy on my TBR to read her new novel. Milk Teeth follows an unnamed young woman, restless and unable to define quite what she wants from life, who falls in love with a man who seems to want her as much as she wants him.Andrews deftly covers the toxic diet and body culture of the early 2000s with our young protagonist, who, for most of her life, has been subjected to this culture from magazines, television shows, friends and family in her life etc. In all the ways we try to voice things out of the body, exorcising them through all our guilts, dissatisfactions, traumas and then some, what is that very next step? every chapter ending with her “itching with want”, “soaking you in want”, “filled with want” we get it, you want. Like many girls from my generation, raised on a diet of Arturo Bandini's oranges and shiny tinned dreams of post-feminism, I have wasted too many years trying to fit into small, muted spaces.

Andrews makes the case for a life lived abundantly and ardently, full of sensation and pleasure, risk and safety. the key themes were body image and diet culture, sexuality, identity and coming to terms with who you are and what you want. She couldn’t tell me a huge amount about it then, saying only that it was about ‘hunger and denial, or desire and denial’, and that it was still in a state of flux, and so to say more would risk fixing that which was not yet fixed.

Through a mosaic of memory and nostalgia, we observe as our unarmed protagonist navigates both her past and present. If you enjoy a book in which every other sentence is an overwritten flowery, cheesy metaphor or simile, then this is the one for you. She’s also been surrounded by diet culture, including miss “oh wow that’s so lovely” Cassie from Skins and being taught that “nothing tastes as good as skinny feels”.

Milk Teeth is the transporting, visceral novel that resulted from that time, and hunger/desire/denial are the words that, were you asked to distill its essence into just three, would still accurately capture its main themes. With unironic uses of stars and constellations that propel plot and navigate our narrator, I'm not quite sure how many filtered sunsets I needed to read through to get to any meaning whatsover.A book hasn’t tugged on my heart like this since Open Water - if you’re a fan of Open Water then I can almost guarantee you’ll adore Milk Teeth as well.