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
And so initially it was this club that I think is still there called Mary's. Mary's? And... In Portland. But then I've had these kind of lifelong problems with my eyes, and there was smoking in the bars back then. So I couldn't really handle the smoke. So that's why I moved to the peep shows, which is just like a box. You're not really sharing air with anyone.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, my main goal was to make as, you know, much money. It still wasn't that much. But to make this amount of money in a short time so I could work on my, you know, what ended up being like my first book of short stories, my first feature film. You know, I needed the time was how I was thinking about it. Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't recommend that job to my child or anyone else's child. But on the other hand, like most jobs at that age are not so great.
I mean, the things that make me most happy to read are like women who, while they were reading the book, felt kind of exposed. Like, oh no, this is like my whole inner life exposed here in this book. And, you know, I've had people tell me that like they were reading it on the plane and they felt like they...
at a certain point had to put it away not because of the sexual content but because like they were sitting next to their husband and it was all their all their true feelings that they weren't saying um and that's always kind of astonishing to me like oh writing can do that like i i um I get a lot of messages from older women who say like, oh, this all happened to me.
My all fours time was 20 years ago. But I'm stunned to realize that I wasn't alone. I thought I was uniquely crazy or irresponsible or something. And so they're just, it's like a reframing of their life to have the community from the book.
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 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.
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 not give them sort of the full benefit of an interior relationship. 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
Showing 41–60 of 106 · page 3 of 6
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