BK: What should read­ers ulti­mate­ly take from Rachel’s spir­i­tu­al journey?

MB: Every char­ac­ter in Milk Fed prob­a­bly has more than one reli­gion, but their denom­i­na­tions stray from the the­o­log­i­cal. If you look through­out the book, gods are made of famil­ial approval, love, desire, the illu­sion of con­trol. I think that all of us, even athe­ists, have gods. It’s just a ques­tion of what are you mak­ing your high­er power.

When I was in my twen­ties like Rachel, I real­ly believed that the answer was out­side of me, and I was like a hun­gry ghost in search of it. I felt I had to fig­ure it out with my head, and that any psy­chic-slash-astrologer-slash-new-age-priest­ess knew more than I did. Rachel is still search­ing dogged­ly for answers out­side of herself.

Over the years, I’ve come to under­stand that every­thing I need is actu­al­ly already with­in me. It’s just a ques­tion of being still enough to access it. Recent­ly I was look­ing at all dif­fer­ent def­i­n­i­tions of per­fec­tion, and I found one that was ​“lack­ing noth­ing essen­tial to the whole.” Like Rachel, my idea of per­fec­tion — whether that’s spir­i­tu­al per­fec­tion, or a syn­thet­ic phys­i­cal per­fec­tion — has often been based on an idea of lack and the neces­si­ty of striv­ing for com­ple­tion. But when I think about per­fec­tion as lack­ing noth­ing essen­tial to the whole …Well, I don’t lack any­thing essen­tial. I have all I need. So in a way, we are all already perfect.