I needed to learn how to look at the woman inside me without flinching, learn how to feed her and care for her, to recognise her as me.

Where one sense of denial in a socio-economic context is foisted upon the protagonist, the answer is often controlling the only thing one can: one’s body. I would rather sit down to eat and think with Jessica Andrews any day: Milk Teeth is a novel about holding space, and the hard work that it takes. Andrews acutely honed in on the contradictory ways in which you can think (key part here being “think”) you are in control of your body, life, food etc. I’m not gonna drop the horse talk because I don’t know where that’s come from and I’m also scared of horses. She’s meandered from job to job, much like a down to earth version of Plath’s fig tree, charading a lifestyle beyond her means in various settings.

The friendships were stupidly realistic, with drifting apart, with parties that make your eye twitch thinking about now, and with so much love and dependency.

Something that feels greedy, rapacious, in its demand for both your attention and the full spectrum of your emotional intellect. throughout, aspects of class are highlighted and much of andrews' prose is deeply relatable and smarting. Growing up, her father is abusive towards her mother, money something that is controlled, while her and her friends attempt to fit a constrictive beauty standard that’ll have them fold their sharp, jagged edges into a tiny box.This is because, unlike her own, ‘their needs were thoughtless because they had the means to meet them. In lyric dispatches, with the condensed cadences of poetry, Andrews' novel brilliantly explores the ways we grow into and beyond the limits of ourselves, and what happens in the gaps in between who we are and who we're expected to be. the bulk of the novel follows an unnamed narrator, as she embarks on a new relationship with a phd student. Her writing is striking – vibrant descriptive passages coupled with stark observations as our narrator struggles to understand what she wants, having spent much of her life running away from herself.