Reading List: Miranda July's ALL FOURS

I’ve always liked the idea of Miranda July – an artist who moves through the world with no fixed medium or gender/sexual identity – even though I’ve never found her films or fiction totally satisfying. What I’ve sampled always felt a little blank, a little empty. Until now. Her latest novel, All Fours, rocked my world the way it has many readers. It’s the first time I’ve ever consumed a novel by listening to the audiobook. And since it inhabits that loose dangerous category of “autofiction” (the main character shares many Google-able traits with the author), it makes perfect sense that July reads the novel herself, so you get her authorial voice as well as her performance technique, which is dry, quiet, deadpan, under-emphatic: all the things I want and treasure in an audiobook narrator.

All Fours excels on several levels, starting with pure storytelling. Between projects, restless and a little depressed, July’s unnamed narrator books a road trip from Los Angeles, where she lives with her record-producer husband Harris and their child Sam, to New York. A twenty-thousand dollar windfalls subsidizes this expedition: “A whiskey company had licensed a sentence I’d written years ago for a new global print campaign. It was a sentence about hand jobs, but out of context it could also apply to whiskey.” July takes this reliably solid if infinitely elastic structure, subverts it immediately, and keeps the surprises coming for 322 pages. It’s no spoiler to say that the narrator never even gets out of town. She holes up at an undistinguished motel where she proceeds to have a torrid, unlikely, never-quite-consummated affair with Davey, a handsome younger man who works at a nearby Hertz rental location.

On the bones of a road trip, July builds a comedy of manners, the kind of novel that captures The Way We Live Now, incorporating without the slightest bit of explanation every last scrap and tittle of contemporary social-media behavior to such an extreme extent that it could serve as a time capsule for future anthropologists studying the 2020s. “Every few seconds I refreshed. Not that he would heart it before coming over, but he might. I imagined him flicking, double-taking, turning away from the people he was with.” It’s always entertaining to observe how supersonically fast pop-culture references find their way into other iterations of pop culture. But as with, say, Jane Austen’s shrewdly observed social novels – full of what she said and what they said – there also a vague sense of fairytale to All Fours, little bits of magic and coincidence that rumble around in the soil underneath the characters’ feet.

Like July, the novel’s narrator has a non-binary child who remains immaculately ungendered throughout the book, which is harder to pull off than you might imagine. But for me the pinnacle of July’s achievement with All Fours is her sexual frankness, which is courageous, riotous, crazy, unnerving, off-the-charts both in imagination and execution of prose style. She makes almost all other exemplars of Writing About Sex (Philip Roth, Henry Miller, Erica Jong) seem euphemistic by comparison. Queer male writers don’t hesitate to dive right into the gritty details of sex – I’m thinking of Jean Genet, Edmund White, Dennis Cooper, Garth Greenwell, Alex Cheves – but July gives them a run for their money in passage after passage that left me agog and often spluttering with laughter.

Quick example, describing a visit to the gynecologist: “There were two other women in the waiting room when I signed in for my yearly gynecological visit, one was young and pregnant and the other looked about seventy-five. I watched the pregnant woman committedly read her magazine, snug as a bug in a rug, the very center of the universe. To the degree she saw us older women, she pitied us. She was in the midst of something very exciting, very right, and after this phase there would be a baby, and it was unclear what would happen to her after that but probably more good stuff! Better and better! And the woman in her seventies, well, nobody except the doctor knew – or could even conceive of – what was going on between her legs, though I tried and saw gray labia, long and loose, ball sacks emptied of their balls. How did it feel to still be dragging your pussy into this same office, decades after all the reproductive fanfare? She was scrolling on her phone, seemingly unbothered or unaware that she had nothing to look forward to, cunt-wise.”

Here is the narrator copping to the ways she’s cultivated to weaponize her lesbianism to manipulate other women:

I told my manager, Liza, to cancel the reservation at the Carlyle…Liza didn’t ask why. She wasn’t someone I ever had to explain myself to or be embarrassed in front of since she had no actual interest in my field; she was just someone I’d gone to high school with. During a rough, postdivorce financial patch, she’d reached out to our entire class, and even though I had never once talked to her in school I said she could assist me for a few months until she got back on her feet. During those months I finished the body of work that would make my name, and Liza, I guess, managed things. In any case it had gone well and now that she was everyone’s point of contact it never felt right to ask if she could move on, especially once she was diagnosed with fibromyalgia…

I can never quite explain how the terms of my success are built upon an agreement to carry this person on my back for the rest of my life. There has to be a burden to keep everything in balance. Also everyone likes Liza. Everywhere I go, all over the world, people ask How’s Liza? and are slightly disappointed that I’m not as gregarious as she is. After events, if I’m made to go out, I usually wind up answering their questions about Liza and kind of elaborating on our relationship, making it sound like we were lovers in high school and now that I’m married, we persist, slightly tortured by our attraction, forever bound. This isn’t at all true. But there is often one masc-of-center woman or nonbinary person among the faculty hosts and they blink as I tell this story, take a sip of their sober beverage, look at their shoes, and when they look up I meet their eyes with a hot yes. I don’t take it further than this. I only need my lesbianism held and kept, like a person who buries little bits of money all over the world – it’s never on me, but it’s never far.

Neither July nor her narrator feel any attachment to defending heteronormative constructs, but it’s not every writer who can comment so knowingly on the ins and outs of queer culture from safe within a hetero marriage.

He’d had a sex dream about a boy he went to high school with.

            “Aaron Bannister. He was the sweetest kid. Kind of fat. You have to picture his face – like the kindest, most innocent face.”

            “Was he into it?”

            “Totally into it.”

            “And was it the kind of sex dream where you’re so turned on you almost come in the dream?”

            “Oh yeah, for sure. I did come.”

            I took this in.

            “What were you…doing? Sex-wise?”

            “Well, I was, you know, sucking him.” He looked only embarrassed to have to state the obvious, to spell it out. I loved him so much in this moment. No man I had ever been with had admitted to a gay sex dream. If pressed, and I did, they would say they didn’t have such dreams, which was even more disappointing. I wasn’t asking them to be bisexual, just to inhabit the full range of their manhood. But I had been drawn to older men. You go back a generation or two and the cost of being gay is steep enough that it’s not something you toy with if you don’t have to; you just don’t remember those particular dreams. The stakes were ridiculously high, vis-à-vis their manhood – it was often in peril and the threat was real; every one of my boyfriends, even Harris, had been beat up in high school for being “arty.” So me purring about gay eroticism was just annoying, as if I didn’t know them at all.

            Davey was this same kind of man, old-fashioned and principled, but he was of his time. It just wasn’t as big a deal, gayness, and so he remembered the dream and the reason he was telling me wasn’t even that – it was because, Aaron Bannister.  He knew I loved to hear about the people he’d gone to school with, the original cast, the archetypes.

The comedy of sexual manners builds to an unforgettable scene involving pee and a tampon, followed by an equally outrageous romp with someone completely unexpected. Pleasure activist adrienne maree brown posted on Instagram that she had listened to the audiobook all in one day: “reading it i kept covering my mouth as if it would quiet hers. but then needing to hear the next bit.” I know the feeling! In the aftermath of that hilarious/hot/horrifying encounter, the narrator hits the streets with a psychedelic sense of erotic openness:

I walked with giant strides and marveled, almost laughing, that I’d actually had sex with someone…and it was the woman from the antique mall who wasn’t even my type! I sashayed down the middle of the street. With the moon an almost-ball above me I scanned the lit windows hoping someone might witness me out here alone and so free…I inhaled my fingers, her warm, buttery cunt smell, and kept them under my nose as I walked.

            Was this the secret to everything? This bodily freedom? It felt intuitive and healthy, as if promiscuity was my birthright as a woman. Maybe it was. Was this the skeleton in civilization’s closet? The reason why men had come down so hard on us since the start of time? I had the urge to call my mom and tell her the good news – but no, it was too later in every way. The moon! So huge! It suddenly seemed natural and sweet to fuck all my friends. But also my lawyer, who I couldn’t remember the face of because we only communicated through email, and everyone else I worked with, regardless if they were someone’s assistant or the head of a company – what better way to understand other people’s realities? I should have sex with both my parents of course (it was only a matter of time), and obviously my cousins, wherever they were, should all be fucked. I lamented the relatives who had already died before we could share this tenderness. Children weren’t a part of this, but the parents of Sam’s friends should be brought in, especially the mothers I had nothing in common with – fisting would cut right through the politesse. And who else? Like God making a new civilization I tried not to leave anyone out.

“Fisting could cut right through the politesse” — that’s one of the many sentences that caused me to literally laugh out loud.

Curiously, the writer whose treatment of sex July’s most reminded me of is Wallace Shawn, whose early plays contained passages describing sex as boldly and explicitly as any in pornography and yet they were both poetic and hilarious in a way that audiences found shocking. When I interviewed Shawn for a profile in Esquire in 1983, he discussed the craft of writing about sex so eloquently that I’ve never forgotten it.

"Our society is sort of divided up so all the most interesting things are hidden," he said, "and we don't know them very well. You meet people and they all, you know, seem to be doing okay, leading this sort of sensible life. Actually, that's the impression most people try to give you. But really, people's lives are much more different from one another than that, and behind the closed doors there are a lot of things going on that are more interesting and moving and a lot stranger than what people would really like you to think is going on."

He means sex, for one thing. “The ordinary way that we modern Western people tend to think of ourselves doesn't really take account of sex. That makes sex very interesting as a subject. For some reason, people think that it's an easy or superficial subject and that if you keep going back to it again and again in your writing, you must be a little frivolous. Even people who like my plays sort of wink when they refer to them, even to me, because it's taken for granted that if the subject of sex is mentioned in the play it isn't really serious the way a play about death or illness is. But in all sincerity, it seems to me to be the center of gravity. Sex is a way in which the mysterious forces of the universe find themselves inside predictable bourgeois lives and overthrow their predictability. It's a very powerful force that perhaps everyone else understands and I don't." He shrugs. "Or perhaps nobody understands."

That pretty much captures how Miranda July treats sex in All Fours. In its seriocomic way, the novel profoundly contemplates marriage, parenting, feminism, desire, and menopause. Sex is not incidental but fundamental to her thinking and feeling about these human concerns. The cover of the book is a picture of a cliff (from an Alfred Bierstadt painting called Sunset in the Rockies), a metaphor that figures as heavily in the narrator’s perception of her perimenopausal libido as the proverbial ticking clock represents many women’s panicked sense of motherhood having a finite expiration date. This is not a subject you read about every day, especially with July’s level of personal engagement and sexual explicitness.

Reading Alexandra Schwartz’s chatty profile of Miranda July in the New Yorker confirmed some of the autofictional elements of All Fours. There are indeed real-life corollaries to the husband, Harris; the nonbinary child, Sam; and the sculptor/best friend Jordi. It’s not clear if there is a real-life Davey or Audra. But I’m pretty sure this scene of high-speed text-message crowd-sourcing on the subject of menopause got transcribed directly from July’s smartphone.

I sat in my car and did a quick round of open-sourcing, sending a group text to all the older women I knew. What’s the best thing about life after bleeding? I asked them. Just let me know when you get a minute! But the first response, from Sam’s old kindergarten teacher, didn’t even take a minute.

            My chronic migraines stopped completely after menopause.

            Right on the heels of that, from a former producer:

            I feel like my true self. Like I’m 9 years old and I can do whatever I want.

            Then nothing, so I pulled out of the parking garage. But at each stoplight there were new ones to read.

            I, a lifelong Catholic, lost the ability to believe in God post menopause. God just no longer made sense to me. It was like a switch that had turned off. This has allowed me to explore parts of life that my faith didn’t permit.

            I never had or wanted kids so I feel excited that there is no possible way I could make one now.

            What other people do, think or say has become kind of irrelevant since I stopped bleeding. Worldly concerns feel like a hectic fever dream of youth.

            No more endometriosis pain.

            In the driveway I turned off the car but didn’t unbuckle my seat belt. These were all busy women, I couldn’t believe how quickly they were responding – as if they had been waiting for someone to ask this very question.

            You don’t know me but Kat forwarded your question. My depression and anxiety and disassociation symptoms greatly improved after menopause and lifelong relational avoidance patterns became conscious, visible.

            It felt like my hips narrowed.

            I heard about your survey from Joslyn! As someone treated a certain way their entire adult life because they were voluptuous and pretty, it’s become a joy to be unseen. But it was a bit of a journey, letting go, and boy how I wish I could tell other women struggling with the fade of their bloom how great life is once you let go of the flower.

            If I’m sad it’s because something is actually sad!

            I’ve contributed 4 people to the world. I’ve done my part. My body is now mine because it can’t be anyone else’s.

            I lost weight after menopause, following a lifetime of struggles with my weight.

            Menopause coinciding with the death of a family member has brought to me the lesson that to live, truly and completely, you have to be willing to let go. Of everything and everyone.

            All of the hormones that made me want to seem approachable so I could breed are gone and replaced by hormones that are fiercely protective of my autonomy and freedom.

If you’ve gotten this far and are intrigued, get the book and read it (or let the author read it to you on Spotify, as I did). Then if you’re curious to know more, check out the New Yorker profile or tune in to her conversation with renowned sex therapist Esther Perel on the podcast “Where Should We Begin?”

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