All Fours — Miranda July on a mid-life reawakening

The writer, artist and filmmaker Miranda July is known for pushing boundaries. Her fiction provokes, not just with unconventional couplings and offbeat sexual acts, but by charting previously unmapped terrain. In All Fours, her first book in almost a decade, July challenges the binary of marriage and explores sexuality in perimenopause. 

July first came to fame with her debut feature film, Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005), then stormed the literary scene with her first short-story collection, No One Belongs Here More Than You, two years later. Her debut novel, The First Bad Man (2015), was about a middle-aged misfit in a relationship — by turns abusive, romantic and familial — with a younger woman. With its absurdist scenarios and violent and malodorous love interest, the novel divided critics.

In All Fours, a 45-year-old “semi-famous” artist who remains unnamed sets out to drive cross-country from LA to New York. Pulling off the highway to fill her tank, the narrator locks eyes with the young man squeegeeing her windshield. Rather than continue her journey, she ends up staying in town to pursue him. Her crush is called Davey; he works at Hertz but aspires to be a dancer. In order to help him financially, the narrator spends $20,000 to refurbish her motel room into a cushy boudoir, enlisting the help of Davey’s decorator wife. “Who really knows why anyone does anything?” the narrator muses.

In recounting their intense but ultimately unconsummated affair, July captures the agony and ecstasy of texting a romantic interest, and the revelation of being engulfed by desire. “I had been a body for other people but I had not gotten to have one myself,” the narrator tells us. “I had not participated in the infuriating pleasure of wanting a real and specific body on Earth.”

I had been a body for other people but I had not gotten to have one myself

All Fours is also astute on grappling with ageing as the narrator, who is bisexual, feels that her erotic capital with straight men is declining. “I had not seen this coming and so I had not lived my life accordingly. I had not gone out and done all the straight things I wanted to do while I still could.” 

Although holed up just half an hour from home, the narrator sends regular dispatches pretending she’s on the road to her husband, Harris, and seven-year-old child, Sam. The first-person approach allows for July’s idiosyncratic internal monologue, with wry one-liners and home truths that at times took my breath away. “For the first time, I understood what all the fuss was about,” the narrator says. “How something beautiful could strike your heart, move you, bring you down on your knees . . . Sex was a way to have it, to not just look at it but to be with it. I suddenly understood all of classical art. The endless carved nudes, Venus in her shell, David.”

If the other characters remain somewhat two-dimensional, this doesn’t feel entirely inconsistent with being inside someone’s head, at least in the book’s first half, when the focus is firmly on the narrator and Davey. The sketchy characterisation becomes more problematic, however, in the second half, when the narrator’s marriage comes back into view.

The cover art of the UK and US editions of All Fours feature a landscape painting of a cliff in the American West, illuminated by a golden burst of sun. The precipice is a reference to the steep drop of oestrogen that women experience in middle age, versus a more subtle decline of testosterone in men. By taking on the topic, July reclaims the mid-life sex novel as written by men (Roth, Updike) or about men (Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s Fleishman is in Trouble, 2020).

“Maybe midlife crises were just poorly marketed, maybe each one was profound and unique and it was only a few silly men in red convertibles who gave them a bad name,” the narrator reflects. “I imagined greeting such a man solemnly: I see you have reached a time of great questioning. God be with you, seeker.”

The idea of the road trip arises partly from the narrator’s own mid-life questioning; partly because she’s owed time off childcare by her husband. Although the couple were “fairly equal” in the domestic sphere at the outset, she reports, when parenthood arrived “a latent bias, internalised by both of us, suddenly leapt forth”. On her return to reality, the “stupid, pointless joy” evoked by the affair provokes a reckoning with Harris and they decide to open up their marriage.

This is a welcome addition to novels addressing ethical non-monogamy, including Raven Leilani’s Luster (2020) and Lillian Fishman’s Acts of Service (2022), which join an uptick in memoirs and how-to manuals on the subject in the past few years.

July operates on “the assumption that we are lonely and alone”, she told the FT in 2020, and her work has often featured eccentric women striving for connection. Despite standing on the brink of that hormonal cliff, the narrator of All Fours, who has close female friendships, feels more grounded and less reliant on fantasy than her predecessors. 

Although both All Fours and The First Bad Man have their pleasures, July’s style seems best suited to short fiction, in which the shock value of subverting expectations doesn’t need to go the distance. (All Fours grew out of a short story, “The Metal Bowl”, published in The New Yorker in 2017.) Weirdness can get wearying over hundreds of pages. It’s like meeting a friend whose company is delightful for a drink but not the haul of a 10-course tasting menu.

Still, All Fours has moments of brilliance, and kudos to July for writing about what it means to experience sex and intimacy when you’re no longer young. “It’s a mapless, unknown, mysterious place,” she recently told British Vogue. Here be dragons, but also opportunity.

All Fours, by Miranda July, Canongate £20/Riverhead $29, 336 pages

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