Milk Teeth

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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. In the sticky Mediterranean heat, among tropical plants and secluded beaches, she must decide what form her adult life should take and learn how to feel deserving of love and care. Across its blissfully sprawling passages detailing scenes from different cities, what anchors the novel is its exploration of how hunger, class, desire and gender are interlaced .

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. The plot is non-chronological, flipping between our unnamed protagonist's present and past relationships as she attempts to come to terms with her life expectations, wants and regrets, predominantly that she's not living up to her potential. This is because, unlike her own, ‘their needs were thoughtless because they had the means to meet them.I refuse to perpetuate the stereotype that all female written fiction is autobiographical – of course it isn’t. 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. They see each other often: he loves to cook; she fights her constant struggle to eat freely and with appetite. The writing was excellent, so descriptive and lyrical - it flowed beautifully and made me want to read everything Andrews has ever written - I can’t believe I haven’t read Saltwater yet.

She meets her (also unnamed) partner in London, follows him to Barcelona, but interspersed with the chronology of this are memories of her earlier life, growing up in the north east of England to a backdrop of diet culture and celebrity ‘heroin chic’, moving to London, then becoming a nanny in Paris, scraping an existence and skipping meals.You held a flame between your fingers and I wanted to swallow you, but I was afraid of the taste of my own desire, like bleach and petrol, peaches dipped in salt. Not to entirely bash the book, in its late Lana Del Rey tendresse, I think the themes of language, voice, and how trapped they are in the body are compelling. The heat of Barcelona and the warmth of the romance and emotions between our two main characters juxtapose so well with the coldness of London and the fear and loneliness felt as well as the sadness, anxiety and negative but entirely overpowering view and perception of food, body image, and eating. Through a mosaic of memory and nostalgia, we observe as our unarmed protagonist navigates both her past and present. Who was almost too caught up in her own head (which I guess is a byproduct of the fact that it’s written in first person -duh Dylan!

In Saltwater Andrews sought a voice that is her own, something she has truly settled into in Milk Teeth. Unnamed protagonist with body image issues is remembering her past life and is now over-analyzing her current one. Comparing herself to the others she observes ‘the way they wanted so openly, without trying to hide it. So, when Milk Teeth arrived I quickly polished off what I was reading so I could jump straight into it and waste no time. What Andrews does with Milk Teeth, as she does in Saltwater too, is give us a protagonist who is clearly from a region, the north east, the same region that Andrews herself is from, and make that very real.However, sentences get shorter, more restrained, when they describe her denial: ‘you reach out your hand. From the author of the award-winning Saltwater comes a beautifully told love story set across England, France and Spain. Like Saltwater (also by Andrews, also loved), Milk Teeth has a dreamlike and meandering character-based plot. 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. Milk Teeth explores what happens when the protagonist presses up against those norms, begins to dismantle all her learned behaviours, all her shame, and begins the process of articulating her desires.