Milk Teeth

Product Information

JA: I can only speak from my own experience, but there are two edges to it. If you do feel like an outsider in certain spaces, because of systemic problems, if you don’t have the language to understand or articulate those systemic problems, you internalise it, right? It’s like, ‘Oh, I’m wrong, I’m weird, I don’t fit in.’ All of that gets turned in on you, to make you feel like you’re not really deserving of things. But then on the other side, I was thinking a lot about the messaging around my own teenage years. I was a teenager in the early 2000s, and it was the whole size zero, Kate Moss, heroin chic sort of vibe. I think the language and the rhetoric around that time was always about diminishing yourself and making yourself smaller. And there was a very self-destructive ethos around that time. Pop culture was Skins or The Libertines, and it was all about taking loads of drugs and doing wild things all the time. It’s set in the early pre social media explosion of 2000’s. It’s easy to forget in our World that toxic diet & body cultures way pre date the Internet. You only have to read The Edible Woman @margaretatwood published in 1969 to know this is true. In the world of this book our protagonist has read & consumed a constant diet of magazines, TV shows, opinions from friends & family. Here we’ve got an unnamed female protagonist who had a very average yet happy upbringing in the north of England. 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”. Reader, I can confirm Kate Moss must not have 1. eaten almond croissants or 2. experienced any joy when she infamously said this. The central premise of this book - seen through the prism of a blossoming, growing & waining relationship - is a question most of us wrestle with everyday - have we fulfilled our life’s potential?

If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month. Jessica Andrews's first novel, Saltwater , was wonderful. The follow-up, Milk Teeth , is even better' Alex Preston, Observer TW: The book also seems to be concerned with the converse relationship – how people affect the places they inhabit, which is often tied up in conversations about class.However, as is often the case in the novel, the narrator is riven by a sense that this decision is not really her own. She wrestles with the challenge of understanding what it is she wants and with finding ways to express and assert her agency. A sense of hunger and desire starts here, in her hometown, as she describes how she ‘wanted sensation, to go out in the world and let it rip through me’. This is something that she’ll return to, again and again, contemplating the agency with which she fled her surroundings. She tells us that she ‘didn’t know what to do with all that want as it swelled in me like a river’, and the novel very much reads like a rumination on this dilemma. This is reflected most expertly when other people’s relationship to food and work go hand in hand. Our protagonist observes the other freelancers she works with, sipping coffee, eating expensive pastries, complaining about their treatment in a banal, half hearted manner. Comparing herself to the others she observes ‘the way they wanted so openly, without trying to hide it.’ This is because, unlike her own, ‘their needs were thoughtless because they had the means to meet them.’ But it wasn't just Andrews'... questionable word choices that bothered me; it was how she felt the need to bash the reader over the head with what she considered to be the book's salient themes: TW: Food is a really important part of Milk Teeth , tied up with ideas of desire and denial. How did you land on that theme?

I thought I had chosen London as the place where I would make my own life, but its edges were sharp and cruel and I got caught on them, bloodying my ankles and wrists. This is a promising coming-of-age debut novel set partially in England, and partially in Donegal, Ireland. This is an author I know I will read again for her ability to pull me into her world, her story unflinchingly real, occasionally dark, heartrending, raw and honest, but oh-so lovely overall. Shared in what feels like a memoir-ish style, we follow her as she shares her memory of people and events that have shaped her life, the focus at the heart of this is on the bond between mothers and daughters. Friends, neighbors and family. Her mother, a mostly absent father, and a younger brother who was born profoundly deaf, which led to some life-changing moments for them all. A grandfather’s death that leaves her with a haunting memory. A grandmother that brings light and love to her life, she reminisces in her writing that ”Everything about her was silver; her voice as she sang along to the radio in the morning, the shiny fish scales caught on her tabard at the end of the day and the hole that she left in our lives when she died, edged like a fifty-pence piece.” With the housing crisis, and things becoming more and more expensive, and people being pushed out, I wanted to ask the question: who are cities for? Particularly London. Obviously, it’s so exciting and it’s so culturally diverse and rich. But then in so many of the spaces you’re thinking, ‘Ok, but who are these shops for, who are these restaurants for, who are these cafes for? Because I don’t really feel like they’re for me.’ 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. Milk Teeth is absolutely gorgeous, perfectly written, emotional, poetic, sexy, heavy, draining, filling, so so so satisfying. So human, so real! Ms Andrews, are you in love with Barcelona? I think you are because you captured its SMELL, which is something that very few authors capture about cities. Yes, Barcelona has a very specific smell. Fruit, heat, sweat, piss, sea, wind, sugar, sewer, empanadas, beer, bread, chocolate. I smell this every day and I love it, I allow it to fill my body and omg, did I enjoy the descriptions of my beloved city in this book. I feel privileged.

From the Publisher

But sadly it isn't a true moment of self awareness; Andrews continues to use her creative writing powers for evil, referring to the love interest in the second person like the whole novel is a self-conscious creative writing exercise that got out of hand. My books feel true to me, even though if someone sat me down and made me verify everything that had happened, I wouldn’t be able to. But it’s because the feelings in them are feelings that I have felt. For writing to feel meaningful to me, I think it has to have that emotional truth. That will always be a question that I’m trying to work out, I think: why do some forms allow that more than others?