Miranda July
speaker
106 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Jan 2025
Miranda July’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
I mean, I think fear in general was also why I wrote the book. Like, I... Upon turning 40, which was a few years before I started writing it, it seemed like this grim time was suddenly approaching that was very vague, like this time of a woman who's no longer young.
And I wanted to not write about that because so many women I admired, so many writers had written about more important things, right? Like they had not focused on the people trying to shame them or the shame they felt themselves. They focused on important subjects. But the more that I... I got older and I started writing this book at 45.
And the more that I talked to other women and gynecologists and naturopaths, the more I felt that this subject actually wasn't separate from those more important things.
Right. I mean, we shouldn't have to reinforce it, for sure. But it does, like, I think people, I don't totally want to blame women when there's real repercussions, you know, economically, just in their sense of what's possible in the world, you know, so it's a tricky thing.
line like I yes I sort of obviously I'm on the side of declaring it but I am kind of often I'm just being honest here because so much of the book is about like not trying to be less ashamed than I actually am um Not trying to seem less ashamed. Because I feel like then you can't evolve. Like if you're hiding the place where you're actually at, then it's hard to get to the next place.
So when I say I'm 50, I am always a little disappointed when the person doesn't look shocked. Yeah. Oh, like, oh, but you look 35. That kind of thing? When they just sort of are like, hmm, yeah. Like, I still have that in me, despite having declared all that stuff a massive construction, you know, like a best construction ever that we become less interesting, you know, so early, so young, right?
I mean, like, why was I thinking about this at 45? But I was.
We're going to have to decide, are we saying you? Oh, I'm sorry. The character, the character, the character. I mean, we can get into that. But, you know, the narrator's saying.
Right. Yeah. So she leaves the sort of more androgynous styles in the suitcase. Right. Every old thing had a modern counterbalance. Past age 40, you had to be careful with vintage. I didn't want to be mistaken for an elderly woman wearing the clothes from the 1960s of her youth. Young people especially had trouble making distinctions between ages over 40.
When I got my first Patti Smith tape, Horses, at 22, Smith was only 49. But I didn't think of her as a contemporary person. I wasn't even sure she was still alive because the cover of Horses was a black-and-white photograph. Instead of knowing this was a stylistic choice, like vintage clothes, I unconsciously associated the record with the deep past of black-and-white movies.
If anyone asked, I would have probably managed to assign the album to the right decade, but most of life is a vapor of unconscious associations never brought to light. A good way to check your outfit is by running past the mirror, or better yet, make a video of yourself running past your phone. How old was that blur of a woman? Was she from the past or was she modern?
And where was she going in such a hurry? I walked around Monrovia in a red shirtwaist dress and white wedge heels. The commercial areas weren't really built for walking, but there were some nice residential neighborhoods. Several times I passed teenage girls wearing backpacks, their breasts inflated by the hormones in cow's milk and barely covered by tank tops.
Whenever I saw them coming, I pretended I was from another country, projecting the air of someone so foreign she could not understand or be hurt by anything American.
I think I was catching myself around this time. I kept sort of noticing what I was thinking about older women and noticing the way that I might dismiss someone or... Or not give them sort of the full benefit of an interior life or an erotic life or think of them as like a sad character kind of for no reason, right? Like this is just like someone I'm seeing in passing and
By the time I was writing the book, I was aware, like, oh, that fear or hatred of older women is, of course, self-hatred, you know, because I will become that. And to some degree, I already am that to people younger than me. You know, so it's like a kind of slippery zone.
Well, I had a different experience from the narrator. I actually had this amazing doctor, Dr. Maggie Ney, who started talking with me about it in my early 40s. I may have been just 40. And she's like, look, we're going to take your blood. and see where your hormone levels are at.
And that's just to get a baseline so that as you get older and your hormone levels drop, we'll kind of understand the speed at which that's happening and when you might want to do bioidentical hormones if you want that. And I always remember at the end of describing all this, which was a longer conversation, she said, I'm so excited for you. And she didn't mean that, like, as a joke.
And I, not knowing anything else about this, never having had a conversation about it in any other time in my life, not having had a conversation about it ever before with anyone, I just smiled. I just dumbly smiled and was like, huh, yeah. You never know what's coming next, you know? Like, this is exciting. Like, go from ballet slippers to pointe shoes, you know? Like, it's always something.
I don't know. It didn't seem inherently bad. But then, you know, as I would talk to my friends, I was like the only one who knew anything.
Yeah, I mean, my changing life moment, it wasn't like I alone in my head was coming up with that I had to do this. It was like an ongoing conversation with my husband at the time. And very slow, and we both... I think as much as we didn't want to traumatize our kid, we also didn't want to traumatize ourselves. And we were very attached to ourself and the triangle of our family.
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