All Fours

Crazy times demand crazy moves, and maybe lots of sex.

Miranda July’s beguiling, witty alter ego, late 40s LA Gen X wife and mother, whips the reader along on a wild and hilarious ride, blowing up her life in a way that brings it more into alignment with the chaos of the moment. There’s a hot young Hertz Rental Car attendant and a gorgeously, expensively remodeled motel room, a retreat into unreality and a return, a psycho-sexual metamorphosis.

This author has such an amazing observational eye and brutal honesty. She is not a freaks to show the characters as gray af, and I felt like I lived in her head the entire time I was experiencing her book.
While i didn’t always love her heroine, she was certainly a character that jumped off the page at you.

Original, humorous, relatable when it comes to love, and occasionally sexy, with at times very vivid descriptions… capturing the rawness of sexuality as it truly is, or can be.

I kept hearing it was the Great Menopause Novel but it was about so much more: marriage, love, parenthood, sexuality, surviving, friendship, artistry and all the other things that make up modern life.

This is not my "normal" read, but it was recommended by a bookstore owner who handed me a beautiful signed copy and I decided to give it a read. In the first chapter, I was all in. The book was surprising and original, and I loved that it went places I never expected. The combination of the premise (moving into the motel instead of embarking on road trip) intimate portrayal of the interior life of the narrator at a crossroads in her life was incredibly compelling.

This book should be required reading for every woman--and every man who knows a woman. It's a fascinating examination of human frailty, relationship dynamics, expectations set upon us from others and ourselves, all while feeling like a deliciously indulgent fantasy.

Read it with caution, it may cause you to change your whole life.

If your book group is not reading Miranda July's All Fours, what is it even doing? July's novel is about a first-person narrator who resembles July: an experimental and semi-famous artist who enters middle-age chafing against the roles of wife and mother. From this autobiographical jumping off point, July constructs a world in which the narrator contrives an elaborate plan to drive cross country to NYC, splurge on a stay at the Carlyle, and enjoy outings with friends. Her meticulous planning is suddenly channeled into a parallel project when the narrator stops for gas 30 minutes from her home,… show more.

I truly love the work of Miranda July. Her films, her strange instagram experiments, and her novels. This work is hilarious, thoughtful, original, and moving. I can't stop thinking about it.

I listened to Miranda July read this as an audiobook, which led to some funny moments when I had it playing in the kitchen while I was making dinner around my family. The book veers(sometimes mid-sentence) from thoughtful meditations on the pleasures of domestic life or childrearing into explicit sexual descriptions, which left me leaping to pause my phone before I had to explain what was going on to whoever was within earshot. What was going on was a complicated bit of truth-telling by July's protagonist, who was trying to envision a fulfilling and authentic life while knowing that none… show more.

I love the way Miranda July blends realistic characters and realistic emotional contexts with slightly surreal actions and choices. This book gives you a deep experience in the revelatory, liberatory, but destabilizing experience of perimenopause and menopause, a topic that is finally getting more treatment in both fiction and non-fiction books.