Bread and Milk

From one of Sweden’s most loved authors, an essayistic memoir about women and food, translated by Saskia Vogel.

Bread and Milk traces a life through food, from a bag of tangerines devoured in one sitting to the luxury of a grandmother’s rice pudding, from pancakes meant to make up for a mother’s absence to perfectly sliced tomatoes winning, at last, a distant father’s approval; it explores how food can fill an emptiness but also consume you. After all, what we eat is inexorably intertwined with how we love.

In this radiant memoir, one of Sweden’s most acclaimed writers considers the complex relationships between the women in her family as they struggle with financial and emotional vulnerability, and how those relationships replicate themselves in fraught and obsessive relationships with food. Bread and Milk is at once wholly original and a natural extension of the brazenly intelligent and personal writing that has come to define Karolina Ramqvist’s authorship.

’If Annie Ernaux and Marcel Proust had a love child it would be Bread and Milk by Karolina Ramqvist.’ - Laurel Kane, White Whale Bookstore

’Karolina Ramqvist’s writing is straight-talking scripture, a spiritual text in memoir form. Food isn’t just love or its opposite; food marks time for the mortal body. Food is how people remember the people who no longer exist to make and eat food. Ramqvist’s mind is transgressively pragmatic, and a constant source of enlightenment. Instead of saying, ’Look at what you didn’t know,＂ her book says, ＂Look at what you thought you didn’t know, but always did.’ - Heidi Julavits, author of Directions to Myself

’Swedish novelist Ramqvist’s highly relatable memoir details the problems that can arise when a child associates food with love...The term ＂food memoir＂ doesn’t quite encompass her profound autobiographical journey...her story, with its lush and evocative prose, will speak to many readers.’ - Booklist

Karolina Ramqvist is one of the most influential writers and feminists of her generation in Sweden. She has written five novels to date and is widely celebrated for her powerful ability to provoke quiet yet fierce questions rather than provide loud and easy answers. In her skillful hands, contemporary issues of sexuality, commercialization, isolation, and belonging become highly charged and, at the same time, completely unaffected.

In 2015 Ramqvist was awarded the prestigious P. O. Enquist Literary Prize for her novel The White City (Grove). She is also the author of The Bear Woman (2022).

Saskia Vogel grew up in Los Angeles and currently lives in Berlin, where she works as a writer and Swedish-to-English literary translator. She has written on the themes of gender, power, and sexuality for publications such as The White Review, The Offing, and The Quietus. Previously, she worked as Granta magazine’s global publicist and as an editor at the AVN Media Network, where she reported on pornography and adult pleasure products. She is the author of the novel Permission.