Miranda July Wants Women To Read Their Inner Lives In 'All Fours'
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This is Fresh Air. I'm Terry Gross. My guest Miranda July was a bit afraid of what people would think of her after publishing her second novel, All Fours. The book is partly about sexuality and has some very explicit sexual scenes. But that's true of many books. Her larger fear was the theme of a woman reaching midlife and entering perimenopause, the time in a woman's life when she's transitioning into menopause and is experiencing some of the many symptoms associated with that time of life. For her main character, it's the fear of losing her libido, dealing with mysterious moods and anxiety, and the thought of being seen as an old woman. But the book has gotten the opposite reaction she feared. It's on many of this year's 10 best lists, including the New York Times, in which it was described as this year's literary conversation piece, and in The New Yorker, where it was described as a study of crisis, the crisis of being how middle age changes sex, marriage, and ambition.
July's moving, very funny book is at once buoyant about the possibilities of starting over and clear-eyed about its costs. When our critic John Powers reviewed it, he said, I gasped in surprise at All Fours, Miranda July's hilariously unpredictable novel. All Fours is sometimes described as a book about perimenopause, the transitional stage before menopause. Yet this flattens it into sociology and self-help. July's mind is far too unruly and interesting for that. John goes on to describe the book as perverse, unrepentant, sometimes dirty, and often laugh-out-loud funny. All Four's story revolves around a 45-year-old woman, a slightly famous artist, writer, and performer, who decides to take a break from the routines she's stuck in and drive from her home in L.A. to New York. Her husband thinks it's a good idea and even suggests the best route for the drive.
But about 30 minutes away from home, she stops at a gas station and feels this electric connection to a young man there, and he seems to feel it too. They end up having an affair in a motel room she rents and redecorates, and she spends the entire three weeks there. Their affair is both sexual and chaste. They're both married. He won't engage sexually, which would be disloyal to his wife. But they touch and dance, and the intentional eroticism becomes all-consuming for her. But then the three weeks are up. She returns home and has enormous trouble reentering her life as a wife and mother. Miranda July is also a filmmaker, actor, performance artist, and visual artist. Miranda July, welcome to Fresh Air. It's such a good book. I really enjoyed reading it.
And I'm looking forward to talking with you about it. So you were afraid to write this book and what people would think of you. Elaborate on what your biggest fears were.
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.
Well, one thing about getting older is I think Wikipedia has relieved the burden of that because for most people, their birth date is on the Wikipedia page. And so you can't really hide it even if you want to anymore. And I resent the fact that women especially are supposed to hide their age. Like, why can't we own it? Why can't we proclaim it?
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