BOOK JOURNAL: All Fours by Miranda July

Entry #5: for those looking for a very weird, very satisfying book about a perimenopausal woman and her sexual/existential reawakening

Happy July, aka my third month festooning your inboxes with musings, opinions, and passionate niche rants via this Substack! Thank you for reading and subscribing. It means so much to me that you are here.

I have a simple request to ask of you: please like, restack, or comment on this post on the Substack app or website. Please also consider sharing with a friend. Any engagement helps my writing find more people’s inboxes, and it also gives me more hits of dopamine throughout my day. So, a win-win.

Thank you again, friends. xoxo, C

---

All Fours by Miranda July

Rating: 5/5 stars

I had the privilege of seeing Miranda July speak at Seattle Town Hall in May. I had just read her first novel, The First Bad Man, on recommendation from my friend Amanda, who had prepared me for the WEIRD of the story. And, July’s work is just that: gorgeous, complex, and, simply put, weird. It’s the kind of weird that takes you by the hand gently and subtly, lulls you into a happy stupor that only good entertainment can do, and then smacks you over the head with a beach ball—not quite harmful or dangerous but definitely jarring and amusing. It’s a compelling type of weird that keeps you turning pages, thirsty for the next wild scenario, inner monologue, or observation.

I knew July was coming out with another novel, so when I was offered an extra ticket from my friend for the reading, I didn’t hesitate. A chance to hear this remarkable woman speak AND ALSO meet her? Yes, please!

My takeaway from the reading, and later from my time with the book, is that we need more stories from women at all stages. The exploration of a 45 year old, perimenopausal woman with ambition, sexual desires, and moral depth and flexibility should not be a new story. But, I’ve never read anything like it, and it’s certainly not because women in their mid-40s on the brink of menopause are rare. Quite the opposite—they are literally everywhere. They are our mothers, and friends, and aunties, and sisters. But, patriarchal/capitalist messaging has always been (both subtly and overly) that a woman’s relevance depends on her desirability, and her desirability depends on her ability to bear children.

So, when a woman’s body enters perimenopause, her ability to reproduce is waning. The hormonal “cliff” appears, and once she drops off it, she disappears from relevance in pop culture, media, and societal opinion—at least that’s what has historically been the case.

July shows us the simultaneous terror, comfort, and delight in knowing that the female experience is ubiquitous, raunchy, and….weird. Even the aging parts of the experience. The experience is also, I think, utterly transcendent, which is certainly the case in All Fours.

---

Favorite quotes from All Fours:

• “My friends are always obliging me with ephemera like this—screenshots of sexts, emails to their mothers—because I’m forever wanting to know what it feels like to be other people. What are we all doing? What the hell was going on here on Earth? Of course none of these artifacts really amounted to anything; it was like trying to grab smoke by its handle. What handle?”

• “My face reddened. It wasn’t just Audra I’d dragged through the mud; it was every woman old enough to be my mother. Including—just recently—myself.”

• “Everyone thinks doggy style is so vulnerable, but it’s actually the most stable position. Like a table. It’s hard to be knocked down when you’re on all fours.”

• “The next morning I woke up doubled over, gut-punched. Before even opening my eeys, it was obvious that I had experienced too much joy in the Excelsior. Regular life—my actual life—was completely gray, a colorless, never-ending expanse. […] The problem wasn’t the lunch, it was what came after, the whole rest of my life.”

• “‘Everyone—all my patients—think they’re supposed to play it cool about these changes […] but ‘freaking out’ actually plays an important role in transitions. Picture how the vaginal canal squeezes the water out of a baby’s lungs—it’s the shock of this squeezing and sudden cold air that makes the baby cry out and take their first breath!’ She inhaled so I inhaled, too. ‘The trauma itself prepares them for the next phase, life on Earth.’”

---

---

Related content:

• July’s other novel, The First Bad Man.

• I’m now on a ravenous journey through her other work:

  https://mirandajuly.com/.

• This Coveteur interview.

• This NYTimes article.

• This short cheeky interview of July on Lit Hub.

• A short story titled “Making Love in 2003” by July in The Paris Review.

---

If you like Miranda July, you would also like:

• Melissa Broder. Broder is one of my favorite authors, and her work is in the same vein as July. Broder invokes a lot of fever-dreamed eroticism, every day quirk, and a deep understanding of the human condition. I will read ANYthing she puts out. Highlights: The Pisces (magical realism and very weird), Milk Fed (food related eroticism; also weird), and Death Valley (this one especially is reminiscent of the fever dream of All Fours; more magical realism and of course, more weird).

• Samantha Allen. Just trust me on this one—read Patricia Wants to Cuddle. My best friend sold it to me as “the lesbian Sasquatch horror comedy you didn’t know you needed.” We both cackled our way through this book.

---