Issue 69: All Fours ... and the demands of an expanding soul
Miranda July's new book makes you believe you can WANT everything you want, but whether you can have it.... well... that is up to you
Towards the end of Miranda July’s new novel All Fours, the unnamed protagonist who is going through a massive midlife awakening, is looking at a sculpture of a headless woman on her hands and knees. “Everyone thinks doggy style is so vulnerable,” says her friend (the artist who made the work), “but it’s actually the most stable position. Like a table. It’s hard to be knocked down when you’re on all fours.” When I read that line, I had to put the book down and walk away from it for a little bit… which I’d done several times while reading it.
Earlier in the book, the protagonist and her husband enter the “elegant choreography” of waiting, praying, caring for, and loving each other through the experience of having a traumatic birth experience and a NICU baby. July compares the “ecstatic pain” of the experience to a “wartime romance: fucking in the face of death, amid the rubble.” I was reading this section by the pool while my own husband and daughter were playing nearby and when the woman said she missed her wartime lover… I had to run upstairs to our room to let a giant cry out… the intensity of the emotion that line provoked in me was a shock but a release too. I had a pretty standard birth experience but I do remember that post-partum family bubble in which the world stood still in our love for each other but was, alas, short lived. I didn’t realize it was possible to miss that time of my life but there I was… missing it so much it hurt.
The protagonist is an unnamed married woman of 45, with a husband and a 7 year old kid. She is a semi-famous multi-hyphenate artist and he is a music producer, —> he understands what it’s like to need to disappear in your work. Prior to the arrival of their kid they are basically workaholics who are mutually supportive of each other. They are able to exist together conveniently pretending that their relationship exists outside of the patriarchy. Then, well.
On the verge of her 45th birthday, she sets off on a road trip from Los Angeles to New York City… to celebrate her birthday, spend time alone and with friends, etc. But before she’s even made it out of the city, she has an odd encounter with a Hertz employee which quickly becomes a high octave and quite unusual affair. The road trip is derailed.
The rules of the affair are as arbitrary as ridiculous as you can imagine… One of the main themes of the book is that things don’t always happen for GOOD reasons, if any reason at all. For example, her lover is adamant about not having actual sex. But their attraction builds to such a high pitch that when they finally get into a room together and he moves his “socked foot” so that it’s touching hers… I had to put my book down again and… well. Let me put it this way: my husband was happy.
I read the final parts of the book while on vacation in Greece, sitting at the beach and noticing all the older women sunbathing in the nude. I know that prior to reading this book, I would have probably averted my eyes, embarrassed to look. But, reading this story has made me so curious not only about the sex lives of older women but generally curious about the choices that people make in order to remain involved in their lives, to feel free and alive.
I came across some critiques of the book calling it gratuitously graphic and outrageous for the sake of being outrageous. And, yes, it's very explicit (there is a tampon scene that will probably become famous). But as a 43 year old in the early stages of perimenopause, a fresh Paxil prescription and all of it sad side effects… I am here to attest that the chaos and panic of midlife is indeed quite real - even if not necessarily expressed as consensual non-monogamy.
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I personally read the sexual searching of the book as a search for connection to oneself. Sexuality, creativity, desire, optimism, professional success are in many ways expressions of the same energy - your life force - and it is in no way gratuitous to me to explode any one of those aspects of your life or identity in order to protect it because ultimately, going to battle for one of them creates a space of freedom and possibility for all of it.
I think that the reason why so many perimenopausal and menopausal women are going nuts over this book is not because we are all sitting around, hoping to have an affair. We are all in our group texts because it beautifully articulates that the conundrum of midlife is not whether to do something outrageous OR live a life of bitterness and regret. The book is moving because it shows that the conundrum of midlife is about whether to spend your life longing OR create a life that is continuously surprising:
One might shift again and again like this, through intimacies, and not outpace oldness exactly, but match its weirdness, its flagrant specificity, with one’s one.
These changes are confusing and scary and real… and we are not losing our minds. We are not looking to escape our lives. We are looking for ways inward, toward a truer version of ourself that simultaneously do not involve us shrinking or doing so quietly. The one personal mantra that I am taking from this book is to continue to create a life that is built on relationships that expand my soul.
I am hosting a Zoom Call to talk about this book on July 9, Tuesday, 8pm CST. Would love to see you and I would join, even if you won’t be able to read the book by then. Drop me a comment or email me at petya.grady@gmail.com to get the Zoom link closer to the date!
A question for you:
Did you read it?! AND?!
I read All Fours, cover to cover, on a flight home from Stockholm last Sunday. I had so many feelings - truly mixed feelings - about the book, I’m still trying to process it all…there were some cringey scenes which made me very uncomfortable, some laugh out loud scenes, and lots of perplexing situations which I wasn’t prepared for. Glad I read it, not sure how quickly I’d recommend it, though.
Ahhhhhh this was so beautiful and alive. Im buzzing.