All Fours.
One of my friends introduced me to Miranda July’s work about two summers ago, and what I remember the most about it is how weird it was, and in that sense—in its weirdness—how open. Reading No One Belongs Here More than You and The First Bad Man, I was reminded of how writing—especially fiction—can be anything, that strange things can happen and then stranger things and these strange things, they can be funny too—they can be whatever you want.
The friend who introduced me to Miranda July’s work also showed me a documentary that July was the voiceover for, one about two volcano explorers who were married to each other. Watching them wander around volcanos, watching the lava ooze, it made sense to me why Miranda July would sign onto this project. It was as weird as her work is, as expansive.
She came to Atlanta on her book tour for All Fours, and I was nervous to meet her in person (the whole adage to not meet your heroes), but she was just as smart and interesting live as she is on the page. Her newest book, out recently from Riverhead (an excellent and often weird press), is about a woman who blows up her life and then attempts to piece it back together, albeit not quite how it was before. I’ve been reading a lot of books lately about women who blow up their lives (somehow just started Glennon Doyle’s Untamed, which so far is very pro life-blow-upping). It is comforting, in a way, to see these women, fifteen-ish years older than me, still very much in touch with what they want for themselves. The scariest thing about being both a woman and an artist is how quickly and violently the creative life can escape you as you get older. More even than womanhood, motherhood often crushes a creative life, something that very much scares me, as maybe (probably!), I want to be both an artist and a mother.
I had a dream the other night that I cannot stop telling people about. In the dream, I had a beautiful deep brown baby with my partner and I had no idea how to take care of him. I couldn’t even decide what to name him. I zipped him up in a backpack and didn’t realize the bad call this was until he started scream-crying. I took him upstairs to my mother, a doctor, who told me, “You really have no idea what you’re doing, do you?” I didn’t. I don’t. I’m going on thirty this year and everything feels buzzy and exciting and like I’m going in the right direction, and it also feels permanent and deep and like the decisions I make now are crucial for how things will be later down the road.
I don’t want to get later down the road and realize I need to blow up my life. I don’t want to be someone who has to start from scratch, but I appreciate that these women—Glennon Doyle and especially Miranda July—are in touch with themselves enough to know that something needs to change. For them, for the characters they create. They understand that you can lose yourself, and they’ve managed to come up for air, to rearrange, to be true to themselves often, to take their sense of self, their needs, seriously.
I love to see that, and I love All Fours, not just for its premise of “middle-aged woman takes back her agency” but for how elegantly and hilariously this plays out in the book. Miranda July has always been an incredible writer, and this book is no exception. I was nervous, as sometimes when writers transition from indie publishing to something more mainstream, they can seem a bit like they’ve lost their edge, and while there is still edge here, there is also very much still a commitment to weirdness, something that drew me to her work in the first place. In a social media world where we’re almost always made to play it safe, to follow the pack if we’re not going to be publicly and/or privately embarrassed, to see an artist relish in their own style of weirdness is quite the relief.
Image: Riverhead Books
