Name: Milk Teeth
ISBN: 9781473682856

JESSICA. ANDREWS

Milk Teeth

Jesse Morley

Horrifically bad writing. I was literally convulsing as Jessica Andrews smashed me over the head with re-hashed versions of the same overblown metaphors:

I told myself the scrabbling way in which I lived was more real and yet I didn’t feel solid at all. I got snagged on everything, my knees black with bruises, twigs and leaves caught in my hair.

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.

And nonsensical similes:

The music is thick with joy and it presses into me like wet sand.

The streets are viscous with heat and piss, bodies spilling from doorways, wrapped in sickly tendrils of weed.

And combinations of the two:

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. You knotted your want into a rope and threw it to me. I shivered in the dawn, counting dead stars, then I reached out my hands and took it.

Midway through the novel comes this unnervingly meta moment:

'I'm finished,' says Isaac and I pull his exercise book towards me. I asked him to describe his favourite hobby and he has written about eating pizza.
‘I love pizza because it is cheesy and tomatoey,’ he reads. 'It is chewy and stringy and soft.'
‘Can you write a simile?' I ask him. ‘If you had to compare pizza to something, what would you compare it to?'
He thinks for a while, chewing the end of his pen. ‘Pizza is like a soft, warm bed,' he writes, and I smile.

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.

Not only does Andrews describe the world she's created in garish (read "vivid and lyrical"?) unnatural gradients and hues, but the characters of this world speak this way too. The love interest writes her a message at one point:

It has just rained and the sky is the colour of a cantaloupe melon. The clouds are bruised lemons and I'm sitting beneath an orange tree. I'm writing in my journal, wondering who collects the oranges when they fall from the trees and what happens to them afterwards.

👏 Block 👏 his 👏 number. 👏

The best moments were those focused on the protagonist's history and inner conflict with disordered eating. At one point her well-intentioned, poetic but unintuitive boyfriend attempts to sooth her by dismissing her attitude towards food as "not a big deal."

It is a big deal but I don’t know how to explain it. I want you to know how integral it has been to the way I move through the world, how I learned to push shame and anger deep into by body and yet speaking about it brings it into the present, when all I want is to leave it behind.

If you would like to experience Milk Teeth without suffering through all 248 pages of it, you can read my abridged version below.

I am itchy with want. You took my mottled shell in your gentle fingers and I slid out, wanting. I know I am not supposed to put my need in you but it spills from my lips and bursts over your body, soaking you in want. Wanting tears through me and I give into it [sic]. My wanting came off me like a stink. We let our wanting spill out of us, drowning everything in its path. My body is a desperate animal, throbbing with constant need but perhaps I could learn to be unashamed of needing and wanting, to see it as living instead. The end.

Milk Teeth

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