milk teeth by Jessica andrews

the financial times 6 august 2022

Jessica Andrews’ debut novel Saltwater (2019) told the story of a young working-class woman from Sunderland making her way in London. Although her second novel, Milk Teeth, flits between Paris, Barcelona and rural Spain, as well as London and north-east England, it essentially returns to the same territory as her first.

This confidence in her material — in placing centre stage a young, unnamed northern woman living a precarious existence but struggling to carve out more space for herself — makes her work reminiscent of Gwendoline Riley, with a hopeful vulnerability in place of Riley’s occasionally caustic edge.

In fact, the sincerity of Andrews’ writing is so unusually raw that at first it can seem embarrassing. The desires of the narrator are expressed overwhelmingly somatically, so that when she reflects on how her new lover makes her feel, she writes: “[A] want rises up in me I cannot contain. I don’t want to deny myself living but traces of the girl I once was are still caught in my blood, pushing me to seal up and run away.”

The novel’s protagonist dances between vulnerability and assertion as she attempts to grapple with her self-destructive desire to maltreat her own body, particularly by not feeding it. Andrews never calls this an eating disorder and maybe there is no need to name it, but the word “hunger” nonetheless appears 27 times in this slim novel.

The author has written about how she was inspired by someone she viewed as another working-class artist — Tracey Emin — to create work about the body “in a way that feels exposing, shameful, raw”. Andrews does this in Milk Teeth mainly by writing from the inside, describing panic attacks and the self-denial she practises by not eating. But she also draws an interesting contrast between the women she grew up with, who dreamt as teenagers of “dancing on podiums in their underwear in the swankiest club in Newcastle”, and the women she meets in London, who work on magazines and eat “doorstep slices of coffee and walnut cake”.

This is a reminder of how rare it is, still, to read about the lives of working-class women in fiction, and it is notable that when an old school friend gets breast implants, the narrator tells her how great she looks with an apparent lack of judgment.

The novel is addressed to a lover, only ever described as “you”, and at first there is little indication of what gender this person is, their tangled curls and painted fingernails offering few clues. It is harder than it looks to write this way and there is a danger that Milk Teeth’s interiority makes it appear artless, as though Andrews is merely embellishing her autobiography. This, however, is to underestimate the novel’s fluency and the sense of narrative propulsion that the love affair gives the story.

It also feels churlish to be dismissive of writing that is so honest and hopeful, as the protagonist battles against her self-destructiveness and is clear-sighted enough to wish she could reach back to her teenage self and friends “and stub out our cigarettes, grab us by the wrists and tell us that our bodies are valuable in ways we do not know”.

This review originally appeared in the Financial Times