More women today are talking about getting older. About being beyond the reach of sex-focused TV ads and ceasing to care. Or about caring too much. About fearing the loss of a sex drive or actually losing it. About what it means to lose the things you thought always made you desirable.
Historically, menopause has rarely been treated with compassion, more the butt of jokes—the hot flashes! the dryness!—and simultaneously something women must hide, elegantly.
Miranda July's latest novel, All Fours, is hyper-aware of this way we've failed women. The novel is a funny, sexy, and loving portrait of a forty-five-year-old woman's journey to becoming herself, to accepting sexual freedom, and to lifting up the women around her in the process.
Once again July writes a character who is—often painfully—genuine and curious, easy to love, yet you sometimes want to scream, No! Don't do that! Anyone familiar with July's unique flavor of humor will relish the new set of sneaky asides and the unexpected revelations in everyday experiences.
It's clear from the start that the narrator, a semi-famous artist, is feeling stuck in her marriage. Still, it provides companionship and comfort in the shared trauma of the almost-fatal birth of their delightful child, Sam, who is now seven years old and nonbinary. But the narrator is desperate to feel desire and to harness her freedom. She's not sure how to unstick herself.
She's supposed to drive across the country, from L.A. to New York, on a solo trip for a couple of weeks. But she gets only thirty minutes from home before she stops and checks into an old motel. She meets a young Hertz employee, who quickly becomes an all-encompassing obsession, and his wife helps her remodel her motel room, which becomes a sort of womb for her rebirth.
Through this strange scenario and its after effects, the narrator learns how to embrace her desire once again, just as she fears losing it to age. She becomes obsessed with a theory that in the late forties, women's sex hormones hit a cliff, a sudden drop-off that men never experience. She finds a graph. "The line goes up at age twelve, then it's basically steady—that was our whole adult life so far—and then it drops. That's it. It's over."
In contrast to this cliff, she pictures her husband going through this period of his life "ambling along a gently sloping country road with a piece of straw in the corner of his mouth, whistling."
But this narrator reminds us of all there is to love, right there for the taking, in female friendship. Her friend Jordi not only puts up with her anxieties and irrational fears and goofy situations she gets herself into—she also guides and advises her, taking her calls at any hour of the night. The narrator admits that talking to Jordi is "my one chance a week to be myself." These two women artists talk through real emotions and what it means to be alive, a foundation she's lucky to have.
In a touching moment, after coming clean with Harris about her feelings of being trapped, she lies down and imagines "getting up right now, slipping out the front door and finding that all the women in the neighborhood were also leaving their houses. We were all running to the same field, a place we hadn't discussed but implicitly knew we would meet in when the tipping point tipped."
As it turns out, her Grandma Esther and Aunt Ruth both threw themselves from the same window to kill themselves when they reached a certain age. Her father is always talking about, and existing in, a bubble of depression and paralysis, something he calls the "deathfield." No wonder these next life stages are to be feared.
Her friend Mary casually mentions that this age is when women must "decide what to do when you come to the fork in the road." And the obsessive that she is, she becomes preoccupied with this idea of divergence and choice—so much pressure.
But throughout the novel, the narrator decides a spoon is a better representation of what she's discovered—a spoon can better hold all the pain and creativity and love and general amazingness that women bring to the table.
Through receiving and accepting this, through connecting with other mothers who have been through birth trauma, she can lose herself in desire and relationships, even if it means more hurt in the end. As July brilliantly writes, "One should always be asking themselves 'What if I lost this? How much would it matter?'" Perhaps that should drive us.
One question persists: will she ever tell her family about her initial lie, the fact that she never drove across the country and was in a crappy motel down the road the whole time? Perhaps with a new marital arrangement and admitting other missteps, she doesn't see it necessary. Perhaps it relates to something her therapist told her about "honesty versus kindness"—that people need general ideas and not every detail. But perhaps handling these delicate topics this way is just real. She wants an experience that is hers.
All Fours embraces the full spectrum of emotions and represents the discombobulation that change brings—even if you're still in front of that change, waiting to be pushed off the cliff ahead. Instead of viewing aging as a weakness, the narrator finds freedom, confidence, and care. As always, July makes readers feel hugged and human in how we're alike and different.
FICTION
All Fours
by Miranda July
Riverhead Books
Published on May 14, 2024
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